Seagate's eco-friendly Barracuda LP HDD has now got a brand new name and some new features, too. The Barracuda Green hard drives benefit from cool and quiet operation, and some technology that is said to deliver best-in-class performance while allowing for seamless integration into a system without the need for additional performance utilities. The low power storage solutions are also reported to be the industry's highest-performance eco-friendly 3.5-inch desktop drives.
Seagate has announced that its new eco-friendly Barracuda Green hard drives are ready for shipping. The new drives retain the same 5900 RPM spin speed as the LP drives before them, but now include Seagate's SmartAlign technology that makes the most of the new 4K sector formatting standard.
All major hard drive manufacturers have agreed to roll out a new Advanced Format standard that sees drive sector sizes being migrated from the current 512 bytes to 4096 bytes, or 4K. This should lead to higher capacity points and improved error correction. Seagate's SmartAlign solution simplifies installation while eliminating the need for time-consuming drive performance utilities.
In addition to efficiency and performance improvements, the new green series benefits from higher aerial density (less platters, less heads), quiet 2.5/2.6 bels operation and sustained data throughput of up to 144MB per second. Over 70 percent of the materials used to manufacture the HDD can be recycled, and the inclusion of a SATA 6Gb/s interface and 64MB cache should keep performance junkies happy.
The Barracuda Green hard drives come in 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB capacities and are shipping worldwide now.