The HDD maker also introduces a unified naming scheme for all of its desktop drives

Nov 1, 2011 13:32 GMT  ·  By

Seagate has just announced that it has refreshed its Barracuda HDD product family to feature the new 1TB platter technology that was introduced with its GoFlex external drives enabling these to deliver better overall performance.

Together with the new drives, Seagate also introduced a new naming scheme, which unites all of its previous desktop HDD ranges (Barracuda Green, Barracuda, and Barracuda XT) under the Barracuda name.

This new drive lineup features from top to bottom 7200RPM drives with 1TB platters and a faster cache. This includes the company's low-power HDD range that previously included 5900RPM drives.

Seagate has motivated this decision by saying that low-power drives don't deliver meaningful power savings in desktop environments.

The new caching technology introduced by Seagate in the Barracuda line goes by the name of OptiCache and is actually a tandem between a new dual-core controller chip built with 40-nm process technology and a 64MB cache that can be addressed as a a single unit.

This is an important improvement over the previous method of splitting the cache into chucks used in the company's older HDD models, as it can speed up cache access speeds significantly.

Thanks to these new changes, the new Barracuda hard drives are capable of achieving sequential read speeds of up to 210MB/s, while write speeds can go as high as 156MB/s.

"A simpler desktop drive product family is exactly what Seagate customers are asking for," said Scott Horn, vice president of Marketing at Seagate.

"The new Barracuda family reflects the reality that end-users want a full range of hard drive capacities and as much performance as we can give them to help manage and store massive amounts of digital content.

“In addition, our OEM and channel customers want to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage in their inventory," concluded the company's rep.

The Barracuda drives will be available in capacities ranging from 1TB to 3TB, with prices going from $71.99 to $179.99 (52.6 to 131.5 EUR). These HDDs will also be joined by a 4TB model in the near future.

In addition, Seagate has revealed to Tech Report that the company is also working on developing a hybrid drive that pairs mechanical and solid-state storage together and which will take the place of the Barracuda XT products.

Photo Gallery (2 Images)

Seagate new Barracuda HDD with 1TB plater and OptiCache technology
Seagate Barracuda HDD lineup
Open gallery