A Tropical Predator Retires; Farewell Barracuda
It’s time to bid farewell to Seagate’s Barracuda. The branding, that is. Not the actual 3.5" desktop hard drive family, which will henceforth be known as Desktop HDD with .15, .14, and .12 generational suffixes.
Seagate is looking to make a splash with its flagship in the newly-named line-up, the Desktop HDD 4TB, also known by the ST4000DM000 model number. Up until now, Seagate's desktop portfolio didn't stretch as high as 4 TB. Only the business-oriented Constellation ES.3 line included a 4 TB repository. But now that Seagate is playing in the super-high-capacity space, it currently enjoys a commanding price-per-gigabyte advantage. The ST4000DM000 is going for as little as $180 on Newegg right now. That's four and a half cents per gig.
The Desktop HDD 4TB (ST4000DM000) spreads its multiple terabytes across four platters and spins at 5900 RPM. The 1 TB and 3 TB Barracuda 7200.14 drives employ the same platter size, but instead spin at 7200 RPM. As a result, we expect the new Desktop HDD.15 to be somewhat slower, and Seagate's technical specifications reflect this. The company says its Barracuda drives are capable of up to 210 MB/s, whereas the Desktop HDD.15 maxes out at 180 MB/s.
Aside from the extra capacity and slower spindle, nothing else really changes from the Barracuda 7200.14 to the Desktop HDD.15. The drives still sport a SATA 6Gb/s interface, feature 64 MB of data cache once you hit the 1 TB model, and are built for 300,000 load/unload cycles. Our benchmarks should give you a good indication of how the Desktop HDD.15 ST4000DM000 performs, and how it stacks up to the Barracuda 7200.14.
