We have seen most of the prominent hard-drive manufacturers coming out with
drives that are environment friendly accompanied by the tag ‘Green.’ Not being
left out of the bandwagon, Seagate has introduced energy efficient hard drives
called Barracuda LP (low power). The drive has a massive storage capacity of 2TB
and is ideal for use in personal attached storage in small offices or homes, and
as they are energy efficient, they can be used in low-power PCs as well.

As the case with other ‘Green’ drives like Western Digital’s Caviar, for
achieving lower energy consumption, the drive has a decreased spindle speed of
5900 RPM. Though it has a 32MB buffer memory, it ensures access time to the
drive is reduced thus increasing performance. The drive also features better
acoustics resulting in quieter operations.

We tested the drive on an Intel Core 2 Duo based machine with 1 GB RAM. To
evaluate the drive’s performance, we ran HD Tune benchmark, where it gave an
average transfer rate of 91.4 MB/sec with an access time of 12.3 ms. This score
when compared to WD Caviar Green 1TB drive (reviewed Feb’09) is much higher as
Caviar had an average transfer rate of 72.5 MB/sec. Since both drives are energy
efficient, we looked at their specification sheets for power consumption.
Barracuda consumes 6.8W during read/write operations whereas WD Caviar Green
consumes just 5.4W, thus making it meaner on energy consumption but lower on
performance as compared to the Barracuda drive.

Bottomline: The drive with its enormous capacity and good performance is
suitable for those who want higher capacities but are short on space.