Samsung may be the challenger and Seagate the 800-pound incumbent, but both companies are very serious about capturing share in the high-capacity storage market. Both have new products and both adjusted their branding to do justice to this particular segment. Samsung’s drive is the first 2TB offering, and Seagate has just revamped and renamed its 2TB product. Which product is better?
Disregarding Market Segments Today
The 3.5“ hard drive market is split into various segments, but these are straightforward. Basically, there are drives designed to deliver maximum performance at 7,200 RPM, and there are products that target high capacity with low power. Both appear in consumer and business segments, as do our two candidates. Samsung’s Spinpoint F3EG is a low-power, high-capacity consumer drive. The Constellation ES is a high-speed business drive. We deliberately decided to disregard market segments for this review, because both drives are well-suited for network storage in home or small business environments.
Quo Vadis, Hard Drive?
The first 2TB hard drive to market was Western Digital’s Caviar Green WD20EADS, a low-power unit with four platters. It took several months until WD and its competitors delivered 2TB performance drives. Samsung's Spinpoint F3EG is the latecomer, as Samsung previously lacked a 2TB model.
All other hard drive makers have reworked their 2TB offerings, increasing storage density, performance, and efficiency. Two terabytes remain the maximum you can get on a single hard drive, and we assume this will stay true until the second half of this year. Therefore, enthusiasts had better make sure they're choosing the right type of 2TB drive for their needs.
7,200 RPM or 5,400 RPM?
This question can be answered rather quickly for primary boot drives. If you're going to run only a single hard drive, it makes sense to pick the fastest model your budget can afford, and that usually means a drive that spins at 7,200 RPM. If you can afford a fast hard drive or an even faster SSD to use as a boot drive, you can instead get away with an efficient (slower-spinning) high-capacity drive for data storage. The same applies to external hard drives. Go with 5,400 RPM if you mainly need to store, back up, and archive files.
In this review, we look at Samsung’s new Spinpoint F3EG, which is supposed to be biased toward power efficiency, rather than performance. The second drive is Seagate's Constellation ES, a performance drive available in SATA 3Gb/s or SAS 6Gb/s that aims at business scenarios. Which hard drive concept is best for your storage needs?
The EG suffix on Samsung hard drives stands for EcoGreen, and it clarifies pretty quickly what the drive was designed to do. The question always remains, though: does power-friendly also mean great performance per watt efficiency? We’re about to find out.
This latest product excels at blending high capacity with low power consumption. We reviewed the 2TB top model, but you could also get the 1.5TB version. The limited variety in capacity points underlines that this product was designed only for highest capacity storage applications. We should add that this is Samsung’s first 2TB hard drive, and it's also the company's first four-platter hard drive. The manufacturer likes to boast that it implements high capacity at a low platter count (Samsung was first to realize 1TB on three platters), but apparently times have changed.
The drive still utilizes a SATA 3Gb/s interface. Running a 6Gb/s transfer speed won't make any difference, since the drive is limited by its physical performance in moving data from and onto the medium. We measured an encouraging maximum read transfer speed of 115 MB/s. The average and minimum throughput, however, is a bit disappointing. So are access time and I/O performance. Obviously, the drive was designed to be low on power, but unfortunately, this also thwarts all performance ambitions with the exception of throughput. Knowing the performance results in PCMark Vantage, we can only recommend against utilizing this model as a system drive.
On the power consumption side, we measured idle power at 4.1W, which isn’t an all-time low record by any stretch, but it is a bit less than the idle power of the Barracuda LP, another low-power drive with four platters. However, WD’s RE4 drive turned in superior power results. Power consumption at defined workloads, such as 1080p video playback or workstation I/O activity, is low, but not amazingly so.
The F3EG offers decent throughput performance and low power consumption, and it showed extremely low surface temperatures during operation. Unfortunately, it has disappointing application performance and only average power efficiency. It's suitable for storage applications like backup and archiving, but the drive is not a good choice for applications that require concurrent activity.
What’s considered high-end on the desktop is often low-end for business applications. The Constellation is a new business product line based on the same foundation as the Barracuda XT. Therefore, the technical specifications don’t come as a surprise. The Constellation ES is available at up to 2TB with either SAS 6Gb/s or SATA 3Gb/s interfaces.
Capacities of 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB are available with both interfaces, but we found some differences in cache capacity. All SAS drives utilize 16MB of on-drive cache while the SATA models have different buffer sizes. You'll find 32MB in the 500GB and 1TB capacities, while the 2TB is backed up by 64MB cache, very much like the Barracuda XT. However, the latter is specified at a MTBF of 750,000 hours while the Constellation ES specifies 1.2 million hours.
The SATA models are clearly lower on power consumption than the SAS models, probably because of the different controllers, as well as the increased 6Gb/s link speed on SAS. The performance results of the Constellation ES are roughly similar to the Barracuda XT. This product is a great example to show what minor hardware modifications, firmware tweaks, and a different validation can lead to.
Read throughput is probably the most important performance characteristic for single-user storage applications, where no or few concurrent requests happen. This is the case with external eSATA or USB 3.0 devices used for backup, archiving, and high capacity storage. NAS devices also belong to this category, but these are usually bottlenecked by the gigabit network interface at just over 100 MB/s.
Samsung’s F3EG reaches 115 MB/s in our read throughput test, which is an average result today. The Seagate Constellation ES delivers almost 140 MB/s and, more importantly, a much better average result. Spindle speed wins.
Access time is less relevant, unless you need to use the drive to host your operating system, swap file, and applications. In this case, Samsung’s drive shows undesirably long access times. Seagate’s Constellation ES wins again thanks to the decreased rotational latency, which is an effect of the faster 7,200 RPM spindle speed again.
I/O Performance
It almost seems as if both drives weren’t designed for I/O-intensive activity. Fast 3.5” hard drives deliver between 120 and 180 I/O operations per second, depending on the chosen benchmark pattern. However, both drives (even the Constellation ES) underperform on this test.
This most likely results from a consequent market categorization: 3.5” high-capacity hard drives aren’t meant and aren’t ideal for delivering high I/O numbers. Faster 15,000 RPM enterprise hard drives and enterprise flash SSDs in particular are the premier choice for such applications.
Idle power is probably the key characteristic for low-power drives like Samsung’s Spinpoint F3EG, but you have to take form factor, spindle speed, and the platter count into consideration at all times. WD’s 1TB Caviar Green does particularly well because it spins at a low 5,400 RPM and it only comes with two or three platters. In this context, Samsung’s 2TB EcoGreen shows excellent idle power consumption, requiring only 4.1W in active idle. WD’s 2TB Caviar Green is at 5.2W, and the Seagate Barracuda LP requires 4.2W. Clearly, Samsung did a great job.
Meanwhile, the Constellation ES is right where we would expect, given its higher spindle speed.
At maximum read throughput, the Samsung drive still shows excellent power consumption results on par with similar drives, and is beaten by drives that use fewer moving parts. Seagate’s Constellation ES power consumption readings are equally impressive given that it is in a different segment. Other performance drives from Hitachi or WD require more power at peak throughput.
Power consumption at a defined and limited data stream (in this case, 1080p video playback) is another important test that helps to find out which drive is lowest on power in a variety of application scenarios.
Samsung doesn’t deliver impressive I/O performance with its Spinpoint F3EG, but the power consumption stays low. The Seagate Constellation ES doesn’t seem very efficient at workstation I/O, as the power consumption is rather high at 8.7W. However, some 2TB high-performance competitors are worse.
Efficiency
These are the performance per watt readings for streaming reads at peak throughput. The Seagate Constellation ES requires more power at maximum speed, but it also delivers much better performance. Therefore it's superior on throughput power efficiency.
When it comes to I/O efficiency, Samsung takes the lead over Seagate. Samsung is so much lower on power that the significantly lower I/O performance doesn’t matter much in the end. Still, there are better solutions for I/O-intensive workloads than these two hard drives, so please consider these results mainly for the sake of completeness, rather than as a deciding factor.
Our desktop performance index provides a useful summary and overview on the performance characteristics of both hard drives reviewed here. Seagate’s Constellation ES is much faster than the Samsung Spinpoint F3EG. The Constellation ES slightly outperforms the Barracuda XT, but the two are comparable overall. The Spinpoint F3EG is Samsung’s first 2TB hard drive, but it still underperforms the Spinpoint F3 (without the EG suffix). Instead, the drive seems better suited to low power consumption.
Samsung vs. Seagate
If you're mainly looking for a reliable archiving and high capacity storage drive without specific performance targets in mind, then you’ve found an excellent option. Samsung's drive is huge, cool, quiet, and low on power.
In turn, Seagate’s Constellation ES is the much faster drive that may be able to meet performance demands unreachable by Samsung’s 2TB drive. Keep an eye on the WD Caviar Black or RE4 drives, as well, as these are occasionally faster than the Constellation ES.
Be Aware of Sharp Segmentation
Also note that neither drive does particularly well at delivering an impressive amount of I/O operations per second. We can’t help but assume that Samsung and Seagate stopped optimizing their 3.5” high-capacity drives for applications and I/O-intensive workloads. This makes sense, since faster 2.5” drives and SSDs in particular are significantly faster at random operations. But it's very important to be fully aware of this situation. As a consequence, it will be even more important to look at performance numbers before purchasing hard drives. I’d like to be sure that my new drives are a good match for the intended purpose.
Cost? Now We’re Talking
Last but not least, there's cost to consider. The Constellation ES 2TB SATA is available at $300 and up, which equals $0.15 per gigabyte. Frankly, this is a lot of money, even for a business-class drive with a five-year warranty. If you were to purchase four drives for a storage solution, you’d hit $1,200. Knowing that Samsung’s Spinpoint F3EG is only $150 (albeit with a three-year warranty with much lower MTBF), you would spend $600.
Personally, I'd probably purchase the Samsung drives for half of Seagate's price and get myself one or two spare drives as replacements in a RAID 5 or 6 array. The cheaper option is acceptable because I'm a consumer and I can live with downtime. In the business segment, though, I wouldn't take the risk, and would go with the Constellations.
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