Seagate Technology this week unveiled its new series of "eco-friendly" hard disk drives (HDDs) called Barracuda Green. The new lineup boasts with non-standard spindle speed, advanced format as well as a special technology that ensures high performance of drives with advanced format. The manufacturer touts novelties as "highest-performing green hard drives".

Seagate Barracuda Green offers 1.5TB and 2TB capacities on up to three platters (with 422Gb/inch² areal density). The 3.5" drives have 5900rpm spindle speed, 64MB cache as well as Serial ATA-600 interface. According to the manufacturer, the drive has 4.16 average latency, less than 12ms random read seek time and 13ms random write seek time.

The manufacturer states that 5900rpm spindle speed along with its SmartAlign technology, it is the fastest "green" hard disk drive on the planet. The drive has average idle power consumption of 4.5W and average operating power of 5.8W. By contrast, competing WD Caviar Green 2TB (with 64MB buffer) consumes 3.7W in idle mode and 6.0W in operating mode.

SmartAlign technology enables all the benefits of the new 4K sector standard while simplifying drive installation by eliminating the need for utilities often required to ensure optimum drive performance not only in Windows 7 operating system, but also under Windows XP OS.

“Barracuda Green drives are among the first hard drives from Seagate to offer SmartAlign technology. This is important because the industry is transitioning to 4K sector formatting called Advanced Format to improve capacities and maintain strong error correction. However, the transition to Advanced Format without SmartAlign technology can be complex and require additional integration steps and software utilities to avoid performance degradation. SmartAlign technology removes these concerns and makes this transition virtually invisible for our customers," said Dave Mosley, Seagate executive vice president of sales, marketing and product line management.

The Barracuda Green hard drive, offered in capacities of 2TB, 1.5TB and 1TB, is now shipping to the worldwide distribution channel.

Tags: Seagate, barracuda, HDD