SoftwareSeagate's Energy-friendly 5,900 RPM HDDs.
Would Heart be proud of this version of Barracuda?
Itò€™s Earth Day today, a day that Seagate chose to announce its new Barracuda LP line of hard disk drives.
The LP in the model name is for Low Power ò€“ the feature angle of this line of drives. Seagate says that the Barracuda LP ò€œcombines the largest storage capacity available with the best power efficiency and performance in its class, using as much as 50 percent less electricity than standard desktop hard drives.ò€
Of course, the energy savings have to come from somewhere, and in this case itò€™s immediately apparent that some of it is rotational speed. Most of the mainstream drives we use today spin at 7,200 RPM, but the Barracuda LPò€™s run at only 5,900 RPM.
This gives the Barracuda LP an average latency of 5.5 ms. Powerwise, the 1 TB model is rated for 3 W while idle and 5.7 W operating. The 1.5 TB and 2 TB models hit 5.5 W idle and 6.8 W operating.
Earlier this week, Western Digital introduced its 2 TB ò€œGreenPowerò€ hard disk drive, though that model is targeted towards enterprises with a beefy 64 MB cache and 1.2 million hours MTBF. Ò