[Brian]

Right before the end of the year, Seagate launched an update to their eco-friendly line of hard drives. Formally known as Barracuda LP (Low Power), Seagate has changed to a more mainstream Barracuda Green branding. The Barracuda Green isn't just about a marketing message though, the 3.5" hard drives feature capacities up to 2TB, SATA 6Gb/s interface, 64MB cache and 5,900 RPM spin speed. This combination of specs leads Seagate to claim the Barracuda Green to be the best performing green drives on the market.

Full Review

[StorageTux]

What about Seagate SmartAllign? How the partitions were alligned? Did you tested different allignments? Is it possible to analyse this seagate technology?

[Noli]

StorageTux, on 21 January 2011 - 03:33 PM, said:

What about Seagate SmartAllign? How the partitions were alligned? Did you tested different allignments? Is it possible to analyse this seagate technology?

I second this. Seagate says their SmartAlign technology is meant to be 'transparent' to the end user i.e. that their implementation automagically aligns partitions etc Their marketing states "SmartAlign technology maintains consistent hard drive performance, even when it encounters hard drive partition misalignment conditions". Could you test it with the QNAP TS-459 Pro+ Turbo which had problems with the 4k WD 2TB? Thanks for any response.

[TSullivan]

Noli, on 23 January 2011 - 03:51 AM, said:

I second this. Seagate says their SmartAlign technology is meant to be 'transparent' to the end user i.e. that their implementation automagically aligns partitions etc Their marketing states "SmartAlign technology maintains consistent hard drive performance, even when it encounters hard drive partition misalignment conditions". Could you test it with the QNAP TS-459 Pro+ Turbo which had problems with the 4k WD 2TB? Thanks for any response.

In the case of the QNAP, we would have loved to test it as much as the Caviar Green, but we only have one drive, so we couldnt compare RAID build times with it.

[cbrworm]

Just imagine when they take these platters and spin them at 7,200rpm. If they can do it the sequential throughput should put many 15,000rpm drives to shame. The access time would be lacking but the capacity. . .

[cbrworm]

I wonder how this drive compares to the ST2000DL001 that I pulled out of a GoFlex enclosure? The 001 reports SATAII and no cache (seems unlikely) according to HDTune. It also reports 512b alignment.

This post has been edited by cbrworm: 23 January 2011 - 12:25 PM

[Brian]

That's the prior generation LP I think. And yes, I'm sure it has a cache If you look at our results, you should see a pretty steady performance boost out of the new Green, as we saw in comparison to the LP.

[stevecs]

Once again disappointed that there is no SAS (+raid/vibration tolerant) version of these LP large capacity drives. For nearline apps where you need several hundred TB's of storage and with COW file systems these would dramatically cut down on power use. You don't need fast spindle speeds when the workload is light and you have hundreds of them.

Heck even here at home if I replaced my arrays it would save over 600W of power; granted I'd probably buy more drives so won't see it in my bill.

[StorageTux]

Brian, on 23 January 2011 - 12:51 PM, said:

That's the prior generation LP I think. And yes, I'm sure it has a cache If you look at our results, you should see a pretty steady performance boost out of the new Green, as we saw in comparison to the LP.

What about the Seagate Smartalign and partition alignment? What physical and logical sector size drive reports to the OS?

[Brian]

It has SmartAlign, we spent a little more time on what that means in the 750GB Momentus review. It's honestly still more than a bit ambiguous though.

Quote

What physical and logical sector size drive reports to the OS?

Let us double check on this and report back to you.