It’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 – the feature angle of this line of drives. Seagate says that the Barracuda LP “combines 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.”
Of course, the energy savings have to come from somewhere, and in this case it’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 LP’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 “GreenPower” hard disk drive, though that model is targeted towards enterprises with a beefy 64 MB cache and 1.2 million hours MTBF.
