This week, Seagate has refreshed its collection of earth-friendly hard-drives with the new Barracuda Green family.
The drives - which replace the Barracuda LP models - will spin at 5,900rpm, meaning that they should outperform competitors 5,200rpm and 5,400rpm drives by a slim margin. The drives will be available in 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB capacities using SATA 3Gbps and all three will make use of 4k sectors. Even though the larger sectors aren't necessary at these capacities, it should let the drives efficiently make the most of the available space.
These HDDs obviously aren't designed to be performance monsters, but they should run cool and quiet while dropping the power draw a little bit, making them ideal for storage drives in a NAS or low-power PC. They're also made with low-halogen components and 70 per cent of the materials are recyclable.
Moving to a completely different market-segment, Seagate has also announced a new family of Constellation.2 drives for enterprise customers. These 2.5in 15mm HDDs will come in capacities of up to 1TB, allowing the manufacturer to claim that it is the first drive at this capacity to be ready for the rigorous of corporate life.
The HDDs will spin at 7,200rpm, use a 6Gbps SAS or SATA connection and come in capacities of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB with a 1.4 million hour MTBF.
The new Barracuda Green drives should be available immediately through the normal channels, while Dell plans to start shipping the Constellation.2 drives in select systems sometime later this month.
