Seagate Constellation CS / Enterprise Value drives?

[bootc]

Hi all,

Has anyone tested these yet? Any experience with them? They seem very reasonably priced for "Enterprise" drives and, amazingly, are actually in the HCL for my RAID controller (3ware 9750). Where's the catch?

Thanks,
Chris

 

[patrickdk]

It's a normal consumer drive. Has same reliability specs on consumer drives, instead of the enterprise ones.

3year warrenty, compared to 5year for their other enterprise disks.

800k MTBF vs 1.4m MTBF
1 in 10E14 errors, vs 1 in 10E15 errors
4k sectors vs 512b sectors

Double latency, almost double power usage, less vibration tollorance.

So it sounds comparable to a WD red drive.

 

[bootc]

Granted they are like the WD Red drives, except these are 7200RPM rather than the Reds' 5400/5900RPM IntelliPower stuff.

 

[FiZi]

Seagate ES.3 Drives (2TB)
Latency (ms): 4.16
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: 1 in 10E15
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR): 0.63%
Average Power: 9.42w
Power on hours: 8760 (365 days)
Warranty: 5 years

Seagate Constellation CS (2TB)
This drive is meant to work in a data center. It has some extra ECC features and a vibration sensor. The WD Red's are missing the vibration sensor from what I've read. Not sure if they have any different kind of ECC.
Latency (ms): 4.16
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: 1 in 10E14
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR): 1.065%
Average Power: 7.79W
Power on hours: 8760 (365 days)
Warranty: 3 years

Seagate Barracude 7200.14 (2TB)
Latency (ms): 4.16
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read: 1 in 10E14
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR): <1%
Average Power: 8.0W
Power on hours: 2400 (100 days)
Warranty: 2 years

I believe 'Power on hours' is the expected yearly workload of the drive to match up with their expected failure rates. A desktop drive isn't expected to be running 24/7 is their logic.

I'm thinking of buying some of the CS drives for my home server and run ESXi and VMs off them. Cheaper than full on Enterprise drives and in theory designed to be in a hardware RAID configuration unlike the Barracudas. I'm planning to use 6x2TB Seagate CS drives in a RAID6 with a LSI MegaRaid 9270-8i.

Would be nice to see some reviews. My supplier said their initial shipment of these drives didn't come in.

Sources
http://www.seagate.com/files/www-co...nstellation-cs-data-sheet-ds1767-1-1210us.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/files/staticfiles/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/barracuda-ds1737-1-1111us.pdf
http://www.seagate.com/files/www-co...tellation-es-3-data-sheet-ds1769-1-1210us.pdf

 

[bootc]

I just bought a couple of these to test, and my supplier has just sent me shipping notification. I'll post on here with the results of my testing...

 

[FiZi]

I just bought a couple of these to test, and my supplier has just sent me shipping notification. I'll post on here with the results of my testing...

Awesome! What are you using them for?

 

[bootc]

I'm building an array of (at least) 8 of them, bit by bit - I'll be buying 2 per month for several months yet. This is to turn into general home server storage for VMs, media server usage, backups, that sort of thing. They're attractive as they are 'enterprise' and 24x7x365 drives but fairly cheap, and I can put up with having to RMA a few drives if necessary. They are also in the LSI/3ware 9750 HCL.

 

[FiZi]

Sounds like we're doing the same thing. Are you planning to run ESXi? or are you going to splurge for a vSphere Accelerator Kit? Or maybe some Hyper-V?

 

[bootc]

Neither, I run Debian with libvirt and KVM!

The arrays will hang off a 9750 in a SuperMicro SC846BE16-R920B. Motherboard is an Intel S1200BTL with a Xeon E3-1220 CPU and 16 GB RAM. There's also a 4Gbps Fibre Channel HBA in there that I run my desktop off...

EDIT: I'll post a full build log to show off properly once I have everything in the new enclosure...

 

[FiZi]

Sweet.

I'm going with this:

Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SAE-V-O
CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1230 V2
RAM: 32GB of Kingston with ECC
RAID: LSI MegaRAID 9270-8I

Hoping to get 6x2TB Seagate CS drives right away and add 2 more down the road. I've got enough PCI slots to add another RAID card if I need more drives later but the case will be pretty much maxed out anyway. I'm going bare ESXi Hypervisor.

 

[bootc]

Only a quick update as I'm not at home so I can't insert them into my current array, but the drives seem quite nice at first glance. They definitely support SCT ERT (TLER), and appear to not park heads at idle, unlike their desktop cousins (so no high load cycle counts).

I'll post some more updates once I've added them into my RAID and had more chance to test them.

 

[FiZi]

I got mine the other day. 2x1TB's and 6x3TB's.

I'll do some benchmarks when I get the system up. The RAM I bought doesn't work with the mobo so it's gonna be a few more days.

 

[comnam90]

Any updates? Looking at getting some of these but want to know how you are finding them?

 

[FiZi]

I've been using them in a RAID1 and RAID6 since January 28th, 2013 with no problems so far.

What would you like to know about them? I forgot to benchmark them as standalone drives before building my server so I can't tell you how they preform by themselves.

 

[bootc]

Mine have been ticking away for the past few months without issue as well. Not seen any errors on them at all, no timeouts from my 3ware RAID controller, and they're really fast compared to what I had in there before (WD Green 2TB).

 

[drescherjm]

I am linking my toshiba enterprise sata drives that I have at work. These do have a price premium over desktop drives but the premium is not as bad as a lot of drives in this category. I can not talk much statistically about reliability since I have ~10 of these for a few months and not 10 thousand.

 

[syncopied]

i was planning on getting some of these, as they are the cheapest entry-level enterprise drives i can find lying around... even though i personally wouldn't count them as enterprise drives (but good enough for me with the vibration sensor + 7200rpm compared to the wd reds, which would have been my other choice)

let us know how you like them!