Seagate rolls out low-power Barracuda LP hard drives
By Donald Melanson 
posted Apr 22nd 2009 1:57PM
posted Apr 22nd 2009 1:57PM
Seagate's Barracuda drives have been plagued with a few problems as of late, but it looks like the company is doing its best to push the line in a fresh new direction with its just-announced Barracuda LP series, which promise to cut down on power consumption without making too many compromises in performance. Specifically, Seagate says that the drives will use up to 50% less electricity than standard hard drives, while also cranking out 5,900 RPM, along with an average latency of 5.5ms, and a 32MB cache. No word on what so of premium, if any, they'll demand, but you'll apparently be able to get 'em in 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2TB varieties (all 3.5-inch) right out of the gate.
does LP mean less problems?
No, it stands for Lots of Porn.
noo dummy, its Long Penis, ya know like me
When you gotta brag, it's usually because it ain't true. Me? I'm hung like a gnat. ;o)
Too bad it doesn't work the other way, there's usually some grain of truth to mocking comments made about oneself in jest....
5900rpm? Yeah, hopefully Segate got this right after their previous firmware fiasco. WD has been doing great with their GP line.
I was thinking the same thing. That is terribly slow by todays more common 7200RPM and the higher end 10000RPM offerings.
It aimed at applications that require lower temperatures and power consumption where speed is not that important.
5,900rpm is a good balance between speed and efficiency.
This drive is positioned as a datastore. Most people wouldn't use this as a system drive, meaning the one benefit (seek time - or more directly Input/output operations per second) afforded to high rotational platter speed is negated. Furthermore, take a look at that average seek time (5.5ms), which is only about 1.4ms higher than a comperable 7200rpm seagate offering.
Realistically, there is no reason why you need an extremely high number of IOPS on a storage drive. This only comes into play when youve got an application that feeds upon data access that cannot be stored in the RAM (a database for example).
Plus, if you want really fast drive space, get a few of them, stripe the drive to about half capacity and place them all in RAID 0. Youll end up with something faster than dual raptors.
I'm sticking with Western Digital for now. I already lost lots of pron from my 2 previous seagate drive malfunction :-)
I picked up a Seagate 1.5TB for cheap and haven't had a bit of trouble. Of course, it did come with the latest firmware but I really like it. It's pretty damn speedy.
Any word on pricing and date of availability?
I guess this means WD's 5400rpm experiment has been viewed as a success.
It would be too convenient to make these in 2.5in for laptops, where power savings is infinitely more important. Thanks a lot, jerks.
Its called 4200 rpm drives
Like half of laptop drives are 5400RPM. If you're really that worried about power, get an SSD.
I would say the majority of 2.5" drives are 5400..
Complete with firmware bugs that cause complete, unrecoverable data loss.
Sorry Seagate... You lost me as a customer because of the 7200.11.
Ten years of family photos and videos.... poof!
Yes, that was the backup.
Fine, go ahead and blame me... You know you want to.
I learned my lessons. I also do extra backups on DVD media. Can't put my total trust anymore on a single mass storage no matter how reputable the manufacturer.
Not to mention they use these drives with their so called backup service. had the same thing happen at my business and spent weeks trying to recover my data over the internet. Seagate and Barracuda are a waste of money and time.
Wait, so your data was lost, or just your backup?
If you only store your data in one place, it's not a backup.
Still wont make me buy seagate . Every single drive from them that I have had has died within 1 year of purchase.
I refuse to buy anything from this company.
+1 for less power
-2 for naming a storage medium "LP" that does not involve grooves cut into vinyl.
2Tb at Vinyl quality says Long Playing to me.
You haven't downloaded many 24 bit vinyl rips then!
Anyone know if I can line these up on Vista with an on-board motherboard controller for a 1TB x 5 drive RAID 5 setup?
Why not... there just the same as any other drive..
Nice boasting?
Not really boasting, was just curious because I heard there's some kind of size limit when using on-board motherboard RAID. Oh, and I'm not looking to keep my OS on this - I'll probably use a Raptor for that. What do you guys think?
I was joking, i must ask though
Whats on those 5Tb?
Ok.. raid 5 not 0
Only as long as you don't plan to boot from that Array.
Vista will not boot from anything bigger than 2TB without issues.
Then in order to create the drive in Disk Management you will need to make it a GPT disk.
XP will NOT be able to read this if its GPT, just FYI.
i had one of these drives when i signed up for Barracuda backup and had the same results. all crap. no reliability and was forced to recover my data over the web.
same thing happened to me. got stuck in a contract that only protected them too
No thank you. I'll think I'll stick with my two faves WD and Samsung.
I'm waiting for a direct comparison of power specs vs performance and reliability in comparison with the Western Digital GP drives.
So am I.
Who cares about power in a desktop drive?
unless these have a power consumption low enough that they will power off a usb port or 2 then i dont see any point in them.
it would be nice to have a cheap usb powered external, 2.5" drives are too small in capacity and cost lots.
Seeing the 5900 RPM spec forces me to wonder if the chosen spindle speeds on hard disks are chosen arbitrarily or not? Putting 8000-8500 RPM drive against competitors' 7200 RPM sounds like a good way to one up the competition, but then again maybe we would have seen the beginning of the hard drive RPM Wars from such a move.
think green? why don't you get rid of all the god damn transistors on the hard drive?
tomo