Computerworld - Seagate Technology LLC today announced a new family of lower-power 3.5-in. desktop hard disk drives that the company said offer the highest performance and best power efficiency in their class.
The new Barracuda LP series drives come in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities and run at an industry-first 5900-rpm spindle speed. Most consumer-class 3.5-in. desktop drives spin at 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm.
Seagate said the middle-of-the-road spindle speed approach offers 25% less power consumption than standard 5400 rpm, 3.5-in. desktop drives, and up to 50% less power consumption than 7200-rpm drives. The new Barracuda LP drives use 3 watts of power while idle and 5.6 watts when operating.
In comparison, Samsung's Eco-Green 5400-rpm desktop drives use 4 watts when idle and 5.5 watts when operating, and Western Digital's Caviar Green drives use 3 watts when idle and 5.72 watts when operating.
Seagate's new Barracuda drives are designed for use in lower-power desktop PCs, and for use as external storage devices for PCs in small offices or home offices. The drives come with a 32MB cache, have a sustained data sequential write rate of 84MB/sec. and an average seek time of 14 milliseconds.
The new drives come with SecureEraseSelf-Encryption firmware and PowerTrim and PowerChoice software, which dynamically optimizes drive power consumption at all levels of drive activity.
The suggested retail price for the Barracuda LP drives are $118 for the 1TB model, $156 for the 1.5TB drive and $358 for the 2TB model.
Read more about Storage Hardware in Computerworld's Storage Hardware Topic Center.
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