Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB HDD

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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We have seen most of the prominent hard-drive manufacturers coming out with drives that are environment friendly accompanied by the tag 'Green.' Not being left out of the bandwagon, Seagate has introduced energy efficient hard drives called Barracuda LP (low power). The drive has a massive storage capacity of 2TB and is ideal for use in personal attached storage in small offices or homes, and as they are energy efficient, they can be used in low-power PCs as well.

As the case with other 'Green' drives like Western Digital's Caviar, for achieving lower energy consumption, the drive has a decreased spindle speed of 5900 RPM. Though it has a 32MB buffer memory, it ensures access time to the drive is reduced thus increasing performance. The drive also features better acoustics resulting in quieter operations.

We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1 GB RAM. To evaluate the drive's performance, we ran HD Tune benchmark, where it gave an average transfer rate of 91.4 MB/sec with an access time of 12.3 ms. This score when compared to WD Caviar Green 1TB drive (reviewed Feb'09) is much higher as Caviar had an average transfer rate of 72.5 MB/sec. Since both drives are energy efficient, we looked at their specification sheets for power consumption. Barracuda consumes 6.8W during read/write operations whereas WD Caviar Green consumes just 5.4W, thus making it meaner on energy consumption but lower on performance as compared to the Barracuda drive.

Bottomline: The drive with its enormous capacity and good performance is suitable for those who want higher capacities but are short on space.

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