Going Green in Heart and Mind: Seagate Barracuda 2TB

Going Green in Heart and Mind: Seagate Barracuda 2TB







Following our review of two of the fastest notebook hard drives on the market, we're going to review a very interesting product for the desktop - a green hard drive. For many people, most hard drives have attained a size that is enough to hold the majority of their data. This has been primarily achieved by the introduction of 1TB and 2TB HDD. The 2TB drive is safe to say the most prevalent data drive to date. Many users find themselves buying 2TB drives as data drives and in some cases, even operating system drives. As the market saturated itself with 2TB drives last year, a second generation of those drives began to roll out with improvements upon the original designs. This leads us to the development that Seagate has come out with, the Seagate Barracuda Green also known as the Seagate Barracuda LP (for low power). This drive is intended to not only be considered a "green" drive but also one that is generally considered to be cooler and quieter as well. Today we will see how Seagate’s 2TB Green drive stacks up against the competition as well as other Seagate offerings.

Specs and Background Data
One of the key factors about the Barracuda Green is that the drive is not a 7200rpm "desktop speed" drive, nor is it a 5400rpm "notebook speed" drive. Instead, it is actually a 5900RPM drive which means that it in theory will not quite operate as slowly as the majority of other 5400 rpm "green" low power drives, but at the same time will not likely be as fast as some 7200RPM drives of the same size. This is achieved through doubling the available cache memory. Seagate Barracuda Green features 64MB of cache unlike 32MB in its predecessor. Furthermore, this drive is capable of utilizing SATA 6Gb/s which should further make it a quicker drive. Also, like our previously reviewed WD Scorpio Black, Barracuda Green also comes with the new Advanced Format 4K sector standard, which the company calls Seagate SmartAlign. We will see how much of an effect this really does have on performance, though.


As you can see from above, 2TB capacity is packed in a typical 3.5" housing with nothing to write home about. Turning the hard drive upside down changes the story, though.

Notice that Seagate also opted to go for a smaller than usual PCB (Printed Circuit Board) on the drive as well. Recently, we spoke with Seagate on their new strategy towards the enterprise segment and it was disclosed that the company is shifting focus from mature 3.5" form factor to 2.5" and that the R&D focus will be tuned to building as fast performing 2.5" drives as possible. Thus, seeing a PCB that could almost fit on a 2.5" one is no surprise at all.