Seagate's Barracuda goes low-power

Seagate has introduced a lower power consumption version of its 3.5-inch Barracuda desktop drive. This 2TB SATA green drive spins at 5900rpm, which according to Seagate gives it a performance edge over competing drives in its class which spin at 5400rpm. It draws three watts when idle and 5.6 watts when operating. Yesterday's …

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Posted Wednesday 22nd April 2009 12:10 GMT

Anonymous Coward

Learn to spoke English gooder like what I got #

"Yesterday's new Western Digital green drive, a 2TB SATA enterprise. . . . . . . ."

Who or what is this entity Yesterday? Is it a subsidiary of Time Computers? Ooops Time UK Ltd. I though this article as about a Seagate HD.

". . . is slightly quieter than the Caviar Green, whispering at 2.0 Bels when operating compared to Barracuda's 2.0 Bels."

Whaaaa!!! 2.0 Bels is not the same as 2.0 Bels

Paris, who may have ridden eh!.... written this article

Posted Wednesday 22nd April 2009 18:37 GMT

I could care less #

Given a computer consuming dozens of watts, and data that may be worth hundreds if not thousands of dollars or more, the last thing on my mind is whether a drive is exceptionally quiet vs a typical noise level, or exceptionally power efficient vs a typical power level.

It's offensive that they want to tell us want we should have instead of putting ALL efforts into longevity. Let it consume 4X the power of anything else if it lasts longer. Let it sound like a hair-dryer too, those with important data will just chuck it into a fileserver if these things matter, away from our ears.

Green is not about reducing the power consumption of things that never used much power in the first place. Green is about the waste of hardware, power and time to recover when something fails.

Seagate, don't bother with this nonsense, extend your warranty and back it with free data recovery for 7+ years if you are serious about quality. Why wouldn't you if you are doing more than using reliability as a marketing point?

Paris, because she gets that words are cheap.

Posted Wednesday 22nd April 2009 20:30 GMT

Raymond Cranfill

Fix your hard existing disks! #

There has probably not been quite as big a fiasco as Seagate's infamous Barracuda 7200.11's. These drives have a 20-30% failure rate. Seagate claimed to fix the "malfunction" with a firmware update that, when applied, promptly bricked many drives that had previously functioned. The situation has gotten so bad that Seagate is offering free data recovery on the bricked drives. I am unfortunately out of luck because my drive was enclosed in an external housing produced by Maxtor. Maxtor tells me its Seagate's problem. Seagate says its Maxtor's problem, when in fact it is now my problem. The drive has all my personal music, nearly 800 GBs, some of which I can rerip, some not. And please don't pester me about backups as this drive was mirrored to another 1 TB Seagate 7200.11 which decided to fail at the same time.

I don't see how Seagate is supposed to recover from this. I certainly won't be purchasing anymore Seagate technology, green or otherwise, until I hear categorical proof that its manufacturing woes are well solved.

Posted Wednesday 22nd April 2009 20:30 GMT

{¯`·.¸_LÅMß¤¥_¸.·´¯}

@JC #

All component manufactures are being pushed to eco friendly tech such as RoHS, RoHS2, REACH, and whatever else the powers that be deem to limit. So its a case of having to do it. Also, reliability is gained by running cooler which means less power, so the green message should also be a reliability message. I would expect the AFR specs for these drives to be better than the 7200rpm previous generation.

There you go, sometimes you can have your cake and eat it :)

Posted Wednesday 22nd April 2009 23:43 GMT

{¯`·.¸_LÅMß¤¥_¸.·´¯}

@raymond cranfill #

If both drives failed at the same time in your Maxtor box why didn't Maxtor replace the box? Did you invalidate the warranty by pulling the box apart? Just wondered. I must say it is very weird that both drives failed at the same time, what are the odds on that?

Posted Thursday 23rd April 2009 15:47 GMT

Anonymous Coward

No, your numbers aren't right at all!!! #

It's 3.0W idle and 5.7W active for the Seagate 1TB drive, it is 5.5W idle and 6.8W active for the 2TB model so WD 2TB is still the leader at 6.0W for active and 3.7W for idle.

Look at the Seagate data sheet.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/disc/ds_barracuda_lp.pdf

Posted Thursday 23rd April 2009 15:47 GMT

Anonymous Coward

God get your facts straight Moron #

Also, you're comparing a WD 2TB Enterprise model to the so not enterprise Seagate model. Get your numbers right, before you post a story, idiot!!!!

Posted Monday 27th April 2009 15:53 GMT

@ Lamboy #

Actually no, a hard drive could consume 200W and be more reliable than today's are, it would simply have to be engineered to do so with reliability in mind, instead of penny-pinching budgetization. "Green" is no more than a marketing term when they find a way to do something cheaper, or with relatively minor expense.

There is no reason to think failure rate differs, if they don't replace the parts (subcomponents) that fail at higher rates. That's kinda why I made the comment in the first place.

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Seagate's Barracuda goes low-power