Seagate is streamlining its desktop range of drives into a single product line to better cope with the performance and large capacitates needed by businesses and users worldwide.
Storage vendor, Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives into a single product line that hones in on performance and big capacities to satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. Not surprisingly, the company has retained the Barracuda moniker for the drives, says Tyrone Grüner, senior product manager at Seagate distributor Platinum Micro.
‚The reduction in the number of product lines is a boon especially for OEMs: not only is it a lot easier to choose the right drive for the job, but it also heralds a reduction in inventory. At the same time, technical certifications are also centralised around the single Barracuda family,‚ he explains.
Topping the product line is the Seagate 3 Terabyte Barracuda hard drive which features a terabyte of storage capacity per disk platter. ‚That makes it the highest storage density available, for now,‚ Gr√ºner notes.
‚A simpler desktop drive product family is exactly what Seagate customers are asking for,‚ comments 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. In addition, our OEM and channel customers want to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage in their inventory.‚
Demand for ever-greater desktop PC performance is driven by better and faster internet connectivity which facilitates access to a world of multimedia. In particular, users are creating, downloading and sharing audio, images, animation and video for work and for play across activities as diverse as business, advertising, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics and science.
Gr√ºner notes that while important, it’s not just about capacity: ‚Improved hard drive performance means a faster computer and quicker access to content, too,‚ he explains.
The new Barracuda hard drives are designed for desktop, tower or all-in-one personal computers: workstations, home and small business servers: network-attached storage devices: direct-attached storage expansion: and home and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to 3TB.
With the efficiency which goes hand in hand with the performance of the new Barracuda line, Seagate is to end production of its Barracuda Green drive in February 2012. Grüner says Seagate analysis shows that its new Barracuda drives have a nearly identical power-consumption profile as energy-efficient desktop drives but deliver much higher performance.
Additionally, Barracuda XT, Seagate’s fastest desktop hard drive, will be folded into the new Barracuda family and re-emerge, in name, as the company’s desktop solid state hybrid drive.
Technical highlights
· Capacity from 250GB to 3TB
· SATA 6GB/second interface
· 7200RPM spin speed
· up to 64MB cache
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