Seagate introduces 5,900RPM Barracuda Green drives

[Jos]

Seagate has been keeping busy lately following its unfruitful buyout talks. Hot on the heels of announcing the industry’s first enterprise-grade 1TB 2.5-inch hard drive, the company is revealing what it claims is the highest-performance eco-friendly internal drive for low-power PCs, multi-drive home servers, NAS drives, and external PC storage.

The new Barracuda Green 3.5-inch desktop drives won’t exactly break any speed records spinning at 5900 RPM but they should still be a tad faster than competing low-power drives. There will be two versions available in three different capacities, one with a 32MB cache and 3Gbps SATA interface 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB capacities, and another with a 64MB cache and 6Gbps SATA interface offering either 1.5TB or 2TB worth of storage.

The drives are also among the first to utilize Advanced Format 4K sectors in the desktop segment, which should not only allow for higher capacities going forward, but also stronger error correction. Configuring a system to use 4K can be complex, but Seagate’s SmartAlign technology promises to make the process almost transparent to users. Barracuda Green drives replace Seagate's former Barracuda LP line and is available now ranging in price from $60 to $120.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/41583-seagate-introduces-5900rpm-barracuda-green-drives.html

 

[fpsgamerJR62]

Both Seagate and Western Digital are now offering these "Green" drives which seem to be marketed for data storage rather than as boot drives. Seagate is, at least, declaring the actual speed of the drive while Western Digital has made no such declaration for their Caviar Green HDs.

 

[lchu12]

I think they is a "assumed" thinking about the speed of these green drives. Where technology ethusiast know these guys go around 5400RPM, online retailers on the other hand put 7200 RPM for the green drives, even though nothing is "posted" on the manufacturer's website.

 

[Burty117]

fpsgamerJR62 said:
Both Seagate and Western Digital are now offering these "Green" drives which seem to be marketed for data storage rather than as boot drives. Seagate is, at least, declaring the actual speed of the drive while Western Digital has made no such declaration for their Caviar Green HDs.

If you check the spec sheet on the Western Digital website it gives you the speed of all there drives on there.

 

[fpsgamerJR62]

Checked the Western Digital website again just now. Specification for Caviar Green drives under the heading Rotational Speed = IntelliPower. No explanation what that means.

 

[captaincranky]

Checked the Western Digital website again just now. Specification for Caviar Green drives under the heading Rotational Speed = IntelliPower. No explanation what that means.

They spin at whatever speed they believe they need to, up to 7200 RPM. I think. They're very bright, they have microprocessors in them. You can buy 2 and run them in RAID ?.....

 

[Burty117]

"IntelliPower
A fine-tuned balance of spin speed,
transfer rate, and caching algorithms
designed to deliver both significant
power savings and solid performance.
Additionally, WD Caviar Green drives
consume less current during startup
allowing lower peak loads on systems
as they are booted."

there you go, was on the website, Points go to Captain on this one

 

[PanicX]

captaincranky said:
You can buy 2 and run them in RAID ?.....

Not sure if this question is rhetorical, but green drives are normally a bad choice for RAID, as they have slower spin up times and often will be marked defective by RAID controllers.

burty117 said:
"IntelliPower
A fine-tuned balance of spin speed,
transfer rate, and caching algorithms
designed to deliver both significant
power savings and solid performance.
Additionally, WD Caviar Green drives
consume less current during startup
allowing lower peak loads on systems
as they are booted."

there you go, was on the website, Points go to Captain on this one

I'd have to side with fpsgamerJR62 on this one. That description is about as full of marketing jargon and absent of technical statistics as it can get.

 

[captaincranky]

Not sure if this question is rhetorical, but green drives are normally a bad choice for RAID, as they have slower spin up times and often will be marked defective by RAID controllers.

Unless you actually know of a RAID mode >> "?" <<, then you can safely assume that was a joke.

As to "Intellipower" and the rotational speed of these drives, it's exactly what I said it was, "up to 7200 RPM". The beginning speed is 5400RPM. These specs were pitched when the first "Caviar Green" was released.

So yes, it may be a bit of a hunt, but the rotational speed of these drives is posted on WD's website; http://support.wdc.com/product/kb.asp?wdc_lang=en&fid=wdsfCaviar_Green

 

[PanicX]

Unless you actually know of a RAID mode >> "?" <<, then you can safely assume that was a joke.

Ah.. that makes so much more sense. I thought the "?" was an actual punctuation of a question and not a place holder, which had me pretty confused.