Seagate's Energy-friendly 5,900 RPM HDDs
Would Heart be proud of this version of Barracuda?
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.

Earlier this week, Western Digital
introduced its 2 GB “GreenPower”
Otherwise, that seems a tad small...
Yah it's a 2TB drive and it eats this drive. Read/Write 6.00 Watts Idle 3.7 Watts... I bet it's faster, too.... WD FTW!
I guess if it can speed up a 5400RPM spindle speed faster yet save energy, I guess that's the bottom line right? Too bad they can't make it at least 6000 RPM.
yeah or 6001, that would be nice...
But seriously, this drive is not a bad idea.
2GB?! you call that big!?
I believe you fell victim to what's commonly known as sarcasm, my friend.
No - these are 3.5" drives - almost as big as the whole netbook!
I'm just surprised and disappointed at the same time that websites like Tomshardware continues to praise Seagate and refuses to publish articles about how those post-unbricking ST31000340AS performance compares with that of early release with bad firmware.
No, that's an even number.
sorry couldn't help myself