Seagate today updated the Barracuda line to include the industry's first drive to use an 6Gbps SATA interface. The 2TB Barracuda XT has twice as much theoretical bandwidth as existing SATA II drives and gives the disk up to 600MBps in burst transfers. In actual speed, the drive is still fast with a 140MBps sustained transfer rate and is helped by Seagate's first use of 64MB of onboard cache for a mainstream drive.
Seagate on Wednesday seized on the eco-friendly trend with the launch of its Barracuda LP (Low Power) hard drives. The disks have the same capacities as regular desktop drives, up to 2TB, but throttle the rotation speed back from 7,200RPM to 5,900RPM. This and other optimizations help cut the active power use by as much as half versus regular drives. The company also aggressively claims that the LP series uses about 25 percent less power than competing hard drives.
A chronic firmware problem is triggering failures in Seagate's current-generation Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, according to owners in the company's forums, NewEgg buyers and elsewhere. The disk series, particularly the 1TB model, reportedly suffers from a bug triggered on boot that incorrectly locks up the drive as a protective measure and prevents the system from recognizing the storage from then onwards. The problem appears tied to firmware from drives issued in Thailand but isn't exclusive to models from those factories.
Seagate today preempted CES by launching a major update to its Barracuda drives. The 7200.12 is the first desktop hard drive to fit 500GB of data on to a single platter and manages to hold 1TB by using just two platters versus as many as four on other disks. Condensing the data improves reliability by reducing the points of failure and also improves performance through sheer density. Seagate itself estimates sustained transfer speeds of 160MB per second and thus competes more closely with some solid-state drives.
Seagate today broke through a long-held barrier and released a 1.5 terabyte version of the Barracuda 7200.11. The storage is 500GB more than any other 3.5-inch desktop hard drive and is accomplished through extra refinement of perpendicular magnetic recording that allows it to fit 375GB on each of its four platters. The density also helps improve speed and lets the disk transfer data at a sustainable 120MB per second, or higher in bursts thanks to the extra bandwidth of its Serial ATA II connection.
