Seagate to Drop Barracuda XT, Green HDD Line
Seagate announced that it will be cutting the Barracuda XT and Green drives next year to simplify the lineup.
The Green series will be discontinued in February of next year as the company said that its new Barracuda drives have a "nearly identical power-consumption profile as energy-efficient desktop drives," but delivers much better performance. The flagship XT series will also disappear and will be folded into the general Barracuda lineup. However, Seagate said that it plans to reintroduce the Barracuda XT later on as the company’s desktop solid state hybrid drive.
Seagate said that the consolidation of product names will make it easier to find hard drives and help Seagate's OEMs and channel customers by reducing the complexity of their inventory.
The new Barracuda hard drive features a SATA 6 Gb/second interface, 7200 RPM platter spin speed and up to 64 MB cache. Seagate’s SmartAlign technology, a feature of Seagate’s Barracuda Green drives, will continue to ship with the flagship Barracuda drives, the company said.

Also, I wonder if they'll ramp up production of the other drives. I'd hate to see more people lose their jobs.
I didn't have any problems with my 4 years old Seagate HDD. Also, I have one 1.6 GB Seagate HDD from 1996 and it still works, though it hasn't seen continuous use.
On topic: Less models can only be a good thing, desktop monitors manufactures should take note, because I don't like when I have 10 monitors from the same manufacturer in a 50$ price range, that only differ through a letter in the name, and whose differences aren't explained anywhere.
I never really understood the need for "green" HDDs. The difference to regular HDDs or performance HDDs can't be THAT much (in wattage, I mean). Maybe for servers or something where you have several of them together. The average user could probably turn down the monitor brightness by 15% to even it out.
PS: Speaking of monitors... Horhe, you should probably spend more than $50 on a monitor because it's the thing you look at 98% of the time you use the computer. You can be sure that they explain the differences for those (they can't afford not to).
This makes complete sense to me. When I first saw these drives at my local retailer I inferred, from the XT suffix, that they WERE hybrid drives like the Momentus XT. It looks like I wasn't the only to draw that conclusion and confusion.
i have 5 drives, most of which are 7200 rpm... my fans are louder than the hdds.
12 drives... assuming raid, that's meant for speed or data security, you have a trade off.
their older drives are great, use to be the best, but than reliability fell when they moved plants.
the monitors are to have more choice from one manufacture, to give you the illusion that you made a choice, if they only have one monitor out of 10, than thats a 1:10 chance you pick them, but a 2 or 3 in 10, thats a 3:10 you will pick them.
green drives are usualy budget drives and cant preform well in server or raid, but can preform decently in a average tower.
and again with the monitors, they throw buzwords at your face and lie about numbers in everything, nothing a company says about any monitor can be trusted, besides what kind of pannel it is.
BTW. ALL hard drives fail. WD, Seagate, Samsung. They're all cheaply produced and not meant for long term use. Back your data up and stop fany-boying hard drive companies. It's like saying bud lite is better than miller lite..... in reality is just all cheap junk.
I just use WD, they have failures too, for sure, but they've been pretty reliable in my 16 years of experience. I had my first WD actually fail a couple of years ago and I was generally surprised.
Seagate. I like them fine but I've had more failures where they're concerned.
You have some very loud fans then. In my server, the HDDs are the loudest.
Do your drives use ball bearings or fluid bearings?
only time i ever heard my hdds was when one of them was a failure and it vibrated itself to death, lost 30gb of data due to that fail... wish i would have realized it sooner, as i thought it was a fan... looking back on it i realize how retarded that thought was. little plastic fan making a full tower with 5hdds vibrate to the point i had to put weight on the thing... you have no idea how hard im loling at myself over that right now.
...and now you do backups. This is how a lot of us learn our lesson and its typically a lesson that only has to be "learned" once.