Barracuda® zeroes in on performance and capacity as consumption of wealthy content continues to explode
CUPERTINO, Calif. – November 1, 2011 – Seagate (NASDAQ:STX) is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and huge capacities to assist satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. The hot Barracuda® family makes it easier for consumers to locate the product they want and decreases costs for Seagate’s original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the variety of product qualifications and amount of inventory they must manage.
Seagate 3–terabyte Barracuda harddrive featuring 1 terabyte of storage capacity per disk platter, the very best storage density available.
“a less complicated desktop drive product family is strictly what Seagate customers are inquiring for,” said Scott Horn, vp of selling at Seagate. “The recent Barracuda® family reflects the fact that end-users need a full range of harddisk capacities and as much performance as we are able to give them to assist manage and store massive amounts of digital content. As well as, our OEM and channel customers like to reduce overhead costs by having fewer product lines to qualify and manage of their inventory.”
Desktop PC performance is growing in importance as computer users consume and otherwise use increasingly more multimedia – a mix of text, audio, images, animation and video – and other rich-content files in areas as diverse as business, advertising, art, education, entertainment, engineering, medicine, mathematics and science. Higher harddrive performance often means a faster computer and quicker access to this content.
The brand new Barracuda hard disk drive – to be available first at online retailers Amazon, CDW, Newegg and TigerDirect – is 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 residential and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to an enormous 3TB.
The simplification of the Barracuda family comes as Seagate begins volume shipments of its 1TB-per-disk Barracuda® harddisk. Seagate plans to finish production of its Barracuda® Green drive in February 2012. Seagate analysis shows that its new Barracuda drives have an almost identical power-consumption profile as energy-efficient desktop drives but deliver much higher performance. Barracuda® XT, Seagate’s fastest desktop hard disk drive, could be folded into the recent Barracuda family and re-emerge, in name, because the company’s desktop solid state hybrid drive.
Technical Specifications
The recent Barracuda hard disk includes a SATA 6GB/second interface, 7200RPM spin speed and as much as 64MB cache to deliver high performance across all capacities. Seagate’s SmartAlign™ technology, a feature of Seagate’s Barracuda Green drives, will continue to ship with the flagship Barracuda drives to assist the harddisk industry segue from the present 512-byte sector standard for hard drives to the hot 4096-byte sector size. The hot 4K standard enables using stronger error correction algorithms to keep up data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities.
Environmental Commitment
Seagate is committed to building hard drives to the best quality and environmental standards. Greater than 70 percent of fabrics utilized in its storage products are recyclable, and all of its products are halogen-free and adjust to the rigorous REACH standard*. These and other initiatives at Seagate are what truly make a difference to the surroundings.
*REACH is probably the most far-reaching and comprehensive chemical-restriction law on earth. Seagate drives don’t contain the damaging halogen elements chlorine and bromine. The absence of halogen exceeds the strictest legal requirements for environmental cleanliness to meet the upper standards of many computer makers and environmental groups.
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