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Seagate intros low-power Barracuda LP 3.5in hard drives

by Tarinder Sandhu on 22 April 2009, 09:32

Tags: Seagate Barracuda LP, Seagate (NASDAQ:STX)

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Seagate has chosen Earth Day to debut a range of low-power desktop (3.5in) hard drives.

Dubbed Barracuda LP, the drives will be made available in 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB capacities with 32MB buffers. What's interesting is that they'll run with a 5,900rpm spindle speed, going against the grain of established 5,400rpm and 7,200rpm models.

Seagate reckons that the LP series will draw around 25 per cent less power than a same-capacity 5,400rpm drive and up to 50 per cent less than a 7,200rpm model - idling at 3W and running at 5.6W when under load. Putting the numbers into some context, Western Digital's Caviar Green is reckoned to pull 3.7W idle and 6.7W load, whilst the higher-performance Caviar Blue draws 8.4W idle and 8.77W load.

Sticking my neck out here, perhaps I'm a little cynical and more of a performance hound, but I'd pay the extra ~5W per-drive power consumption and go for something like the Caviar Blue. Used 40 hours a week and 50 weeks of the year, the total additional electricity cost would be around £1.50, and I'm sure the very first Barracuda LPs won't be cheap. The exact release date and pricing have to be finalised, however.

HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Posted by Funkstar - Wed 22 Apr 2009 09:43
Release dates? Prices?

Seems like a waste of a press release to me. Oh actually, they'll probably just recycle it when they are actually ready to release these drives.
Posted by Nelviticus - Wed 22 Apr 2009 11:29
Sticking my neck out here, perhaps I'm a little cynical and more of a performance hound, but I'd pay the extra ~5W per-drive power consumption and go for something like the Caviar Blue. Used 40 hours a week and 50 weeks of the year, the total additional electricity cost would be around £1.50

For a desktop, yes, but what about for a NAS? I have a little Thecus NAS with a 1GB Samsung F1 that runs 24 hours a day and I've been wondering recently whether the reduced performance of a lower-power drive would be noticeable in a NAS. How about a Hexus feature on whether it's worth shelling out for high-speed drives for a NAS?
Posted by Funkstar - Wed 22 Apr 2009 11:38
In the little consumer oriented NAS boxes, even a slow drive is going to be bottle necked by the processor of the NAS. You could put a couple of laptop drives in there and probably not change the performance. Likewise, putting a couple of SSDs in there isn't going to speed it up.

Large SoHo NAS solutions are another matter. Things like the N7700/N880 from Thecus could benefit from faster drives.

Though if you are going to throw serious money at it, you are far better building you own server.
Posted by Methanoid - Wed 22 Apr 2009 12:26
Nelviticus
For a desktop, yes, but what about for a NAS? I have a little Thecus NAS with a 1GB Samsung F1 that runs 24 hours a day and I've been wondering recently whether the reduced performance of a lower-power drive would be noticeable in a NAS. How about a Hexus feature on whether it's worth shelling out for high-speed drives for a NAS?

I think you're right. No noticeable different when the CPU probably limits your transfer speeds. Eg Bufalo Linkstation 400mhz ARM = 12.5Mb/s but with 1.2Ghz ARM 30Mb/s - neither of which will matter with any modern HDD.

That's why I have a Samsung F2 (5400rpm) about to go into my NAS - lower power and noise levels but same performance in a NAS.