see this two dimes right there that's how much money you save per
year going with a 5400 RPM drive or a
5900 RPM drive versus a 7200 RPM drive
that is optimized for power efficiency at least that is what Seagate is
claiming is the reason that they are switching from having a green or an
eco-friendly optimized lower RPM lower
performance storage drive and then a middleof the range sort of uh still
purely magnetic storage so sort of Seagate strategy going forward is going
to be a little bit different but having a green drive versus a 7200 RPM somewhat
performance drive and then a higher end drive so in the past they had the
Barracuda 5900 RPM Drive they had the
Barracuda 7200 RPM drive and then they had the bar XT which was a 7200 RPM
drive with better performance more tuning etc etc well now Seagate is doing
away with that three- tiered approach and they are going with only a single
pure magnetic drive at least sometime in the future so right now they still have
the Barracuda this is an eval unit so
hence the labeling on it and they're still going to have the Barracuda XT but
the XT is going to be a hybrid Drive in the future and they are completely doing
away with the lower RPM drives because seate says that for the savings and for
the performance reduction it is simply not worth the slight decrease in cost
that a 5400 or 5900 RPM Drive provides
because in terms of manufacturing they're actually very very similar also
in terms of the testing and validation process they take longer to validate
because they spin slower so you actually on the manufacturing level are not
really saving very much money at all so here we go this is code name Granada
this is a 7200 RPM this is going to be the Barracuda Drive moving forward and
then there will be the Barracuda XT at some point in the future it has a 64 Meg
cache which is all fine and good but what's really interesting about this
drive is the fact that Seagate now has
one tbte platters so what do one tab
platters mean one tab platters mean that your 2 tbte Drive is going to be faster
due to the increased density of the data storage on the drive so it's going to be
faster than your old 2 tbte drive and it's also going to be more reliable than
your old 2 tab drive and the reason for that is that it actually has fewer parts
inside so fewer points of failure compared to a drive that has a ton of
platters and a ton of read heads in order to achieve the capacity that it
has achieved now in terms of the actual
physical drive itself you're going to notice this looks an awful lot like a
standard 3 and 1/2 in drive you got your SATA power you got your SATA 6 gbit per
second or six yeah 6 gabit per second 600 megabit per second no 6 gbit per
second you wrote 600 megabit per second
uh either way you've got your SATA 3 6 GB per second interface here you got a
couple little jumpers there you got your standard mounting holes all that good
stuff so what is this really about this video isn't really about the unboxing or
debagging of this particular drive this is more about seates refocus on what is
best for the consumer so what they're saying is you know what enough of this
20 cents of savings per year nonsense because honestly you're probably losing
far more than that in terms of productivity just waiting around for
your data to be accessed let's not you know charge more for the performance
drive if it costs as much to manufacture and it uses as much power almost it's
actually slightly less power efficient than a low RPM drive but let's not
charge more for it if it doesn't actually cost us more to produce so
they're going ahead they're saying let's simplify things for the consumer we're
going to have one drive in a variety of capacities and then on the performance
side we're going to do hybrid drives we're going to add caching to them they're going to be legitimately much
higher performance than a standard 7200 RPM drive and that's the only
differentiation that they're going to have so I say thumbs up to seate for
simplifying things for the consumer and simplifying things really at every level
at their own level at the retailer level they don't have to have as many SKS you
want a hard drive here's a hard drive you want a hybrid Drive here's a hybrid Drive that's pretty much it so thank you
for checking out my unboxing of the Barracuda CDU unit so I don't know what
that stands for but there you go and don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech
tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos