The chaps over at HotHardware take a further look at the Seagate's Barracuda ES.2 1TB SAS Hard Drive. Not only is the Barracuda ES.2 the highest capacity SAS disk to date, it's also the first SAS disk I have seen on the market with a 7,200 RPM spindle speed and SATA-like pricing.

There are a few scenarios which play out as possible needs for such a product. First off, you have those who want a ripping fast 15K SAS drive as the boot drive or for high throughput/transaction rate applications, along with one or more 1 TB SAS disks for bulk storage. Previously, you would have to opt for a high-capacity SATA drive, which would have to run on another connector (typically your motherboard or another controller). These drives could also be heavily used to provide large-scale capacity for rack servers with SAS interfaces. Or, you could run the disks all by themselves with a cheap SAS controller or an onboard SAS controller, and have mildly fast storage with the benefits of SAS coming into play.

If you're looking for an incredibly fast drive, this new Barracuda doesn't have as much bite as its high-end SAS brethren, but there are environments where it performs quite well for a 7,200 RPM class drive. The drive can perform quite well under certain scenarios, as shown by our HDTune and IOmeter benchmarks, which were very solid for a 7,200 RPM solution. On the other hand, our FC-Test and PCMark Vantage disk numbers were undeniably pokey, giving us a mixed opinion on the product for mainstream applications. When you throw in the higher cost of the solution with the price of a SAS controller card, one of the new generation 7,200 RPM SATA drives will typically provide similar levels of performance compared to the ES.2 SAS. Whether its performance abnormalities were caused by the lower cache memory or inefficiencies with our SAS controller, its performance today in some scenarios is just doesn't quite measure up.