Mac Pro Drives at NewEgg...what's the difference? [Archive]

hayduke

Jan 23, 2007, 02:07 PM

Hey All - I'd like to add another 750GB drive to my Mac Pro. I looked at NewEgg and saw two listed, but I can't tell what the difference is...except the price! Any thoughts about these two? Any other recommendations?

Linky (http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?SrchInDesc=750GB%20SATA%20Seagate%20Barracuda&Page=1&Nty=1&N=0&Submit=ENE&Description=750GB&Ntk=all)

Umbongo

Jan 23, 2007, 02:23 PM

From another forum:

The Barracuda ES maximizes system availability and performance in high drive-count storage systems, thanks to enterprise multi-drive firmware
features and rotational vibration (RV) tolerance.

Barracuda AS maximizes system availability and performance in high
performance desk top systems where speed and reliability are the primary
considerations. The AS models are versatile and targeted to a compromise
of all drive performance requirements for a home system that is quiet,
fast, and trouble free.

The ES models have enhancements for implementing dense storage solutions,
especially in external storage environments (NAS, SAN or RAID systems)
where a multitude of drives is often deployed.

The "ES" models are programmed to provide 24/7 features such as Error
Recovery Control, Workload Management, Rotational Vibration Feed Forward,
this is a rotational vibration tolerance which maintains performance in
high-density environments, One Step Microcode Download and other Server/
RAID firmware functions that are enterprise directed. The drives are not
as fast as the AS models when transmitting large files as at some point
they will start to verify the files following writing. This will maintain
data integrity for the files as they are written.

The ES models are for RAID applications which utilize numerous drives in a
RAID enclosure.

There didn't used to be such a price difference, but the non-ES model has dropped $70 over the past couple of months.