Seagate Cheetah NS.2 HDs & LSI 3ware SAS 9750-4i RAID Card Review

Seagate is well known for their popular Barracuda line-up of SATA hard drives that provide optimal performance for pretty much any task you are looking for. However, if you are into hard drive intensive tasks like high-definition video editing and compositing, standard SATA hard drives could be a big bottleneck in your system. I personally work with lots of high-definition 1080p uncompressed video footage, and my two Western Digital RAID Edition 1TB hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration were not able to handle uncompressed HD footage without any lags. You might wonder, well what type of performance does an uncompressed HD footage require from a hard drive? Well, to answer that, it really depends on file formats and the amount of complexity of the scene, but usually, it is in between 100-300MB/s transfer/read speed. Since two standard 7200RPM 3.0Gb/s SATA II hard drives can only handle around 115-200MB/s in average, a person could easily see performance decreases in their production, especially when combining more than one uncompressed footage in their composition. This is why Seagate also comes with high-performance SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) server based hard drives, like the Seagate Cheetah NS.2. We are reviewing four Seagate Cheetah NS.2 600GB 10,000RPM 6.0Gbit/s SAS hard drives in order to see how well they perform in tasks like video editing and composing. We are going to explain everything in the results section on how many hard drives and what type of configurations will work well with uncompressed high-definition videos, but before we do that, let’s go a bit more into detail about the Seagate Cheetah NS.2 hard drives so we could understand what makes these hard drives so special.

Via [Bjorn3D]