Seagate Barracuda LP 2TB HDD

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.