Seagate to stop selling Barracuda Green hard drives
published January 8th, 2012 | categories: hard drive | all categories
Seagate is stepping forward to deliver a message about Green hard drives.
“This green drive category that’s sort of popped up over the last few years is really more hype and marketing fluff than it is reality,” says David Burks, a product manager within Seagate’s desktop hard drive group. “A green drive is marketed around the idea of saving electricity.’ But especially in a desktop environment, when you look at the numbers and you run the math, depending on the drive, you’ll save 20 cents, maybe 50 cents at the top end, per year in electricity costs from using a green drive in a PC. Meanwhile, you’re losing as much as 30% to 40% in your hard drive performance because you’re using 5400 RPM drives.”
Let’s take a look at the average power consumption of a Seagate Barracuda drive.
- average operating power of 8.0W and idle consumption of 5.4W
- green LP drive has an average operating power of 5.8W and an idle draw of 4.5W
After all of this, Seagate is killing the Barracuda Green drives. A Green drive performs approximately 30%-40% slower than a traditional 7200RPM drive. Using Green hard drives will generally save a consumer anywhere from $0.62-$2.19/year. Green drives are also quite slow, which means that your computer will spend more time processing the query or game than the money that it would save while at idle.
Why are we even talking about Green drives, when you should be using SSD’s 
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