Seagate price difference

[b0redom]

What's the difference between this:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=587941

and this?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=588422

Is it just NCQ and 8MB extra cache? £60 seems like big chunk of cash. Would it really make that much performance difference?

[Lucio]

Basically it's a question of reliability, the ES version is built to a higher standard as it's designed to be used by companies that can't afford to really had a HDD failure.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/data...rracuda_es.pdf

[peterb]

As Lucio says... The clue is in the description 'Enterprise grade' - it is designed to run 24x7 in server type applications.

I haven't looked at the spec sheet for these drives, but a typical desktop gives a (for example) 300,000 hours MTBF based on running 10 hours a day (and occasionaly give the lifetime maximum number of starts and stops - say 50,000) An enterprise drive may have (say) 750,000 hours MTBF based on 24x7 running times. The build quality will be higher (better bearings in the mechnaical parts) and the testing and burn in times will be longer to eliminate the early failures. These drives often have fewer faulty sectors and are recommended for RAID applications where data reliability, availability and integrity is paramount.