April 22nd, 2009
Seagate debuts low-power Barracuda LP 3.5" hard drives
It’s Earth Day today, so what better day for Seagate to roll out a new green range of 3.5″ desktop hard drives.
The Barracuda LP comes in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities and feature 32MB of cache.
The Barracuda LP has two tricks up its sleeve:
- It’s a low power drive, sipping only 3W when idle and 5.6W when busy. That’s around 25% less power consumption than a similar 5,400 RPM drive and 50% less than a 7,200 RPM drive. This makes the Barracuda LP more power-frugal than Western Digital’s Caviar Green drives.
- The platters don’t spin at either 5,400 RPM or 7,200 RPM. Instead they rotate at an unconventional 5,900 RPM.
Given the capacities of these drives I expect we’ll see them in NAS boxes and external hard drives before they make their way into PCs. Lower power consumption means less heat, and less heat to have to deal with translates into greater reliability.
“Growing demand for power-efficient computing systems is not just a data center phenomenon as more builders of external storage devices, desktop PCs and home networking systems work to provide customers with products that combine power-efficiency with rock-solid performance,” said Seagate vice president Joan Motsinger.
Price is $258 for the 2TB model, with the 1.5TB and 1TB models going for $156 and $118 respectively.
No release date details have been announced yet.
Adrian is a technology journalist and author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology. He also runs a popular blog called The PC Doctor. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations
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