Seagate's Barracuda 'Green' - best 4K sector drive, top performance

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 16 December 2010 13:36

Business IT - Technology

Although other hard drive manufacturers have units with 4K sector technology, none have Seagate's exclusive firmware that eliminates time-wasting software alignment, clocking in with the highest 'in-class' performance and faster spin speeds, SATA 6GB compatibility, excellent recyclability and low-power requirements. Looks like it is easy being green!

When companies like Seagate release genuine improvements to their hard drives, it's always disappointing when some journalists miss the point completely.

An excellent example of this is The Inquirer's Lawrence Latif. Relatively new to the world of journalism, seeing as I've been reading The Inquirer for years now, his brief in life seems to be negativity - I can't remember a single positive thing Mr Latif has said, about anything, ever.

His article claims Seagate's new 'Barracuda Green' is but a rebadge of Seagate's previous Barracuda LP model, with LP having stood for 'low power'.

Unfortunately for Mr Latif, who writes negative but amusing articles, he is wrong.

You see, the new Barracuda Green is much more than just a re-release. It is Seagate's first 3.5-inch hard drive to take advantage of 4K sector technology, something that eliminates the old 512 byte sectors and merges 8 of those 512 byte sectors (complete with multiple headers and other space and time wasting blocks of info) into a 4K sector that delivers more usable space and improves performance, while still having low-power characteristics.  

Although other manufacturers have released 4K sector drives, they all have a big problem: most operating systems, including Windows 7, don't really work with 4K drives properly out of the box, with the issue being a 'misalignment' of sectors compared to the 512 byte sectors the OS is expecting, and this can lead to a 30-40% performance loss compared to an aligned drive.

To clarify on Win 7 for a moment - it does support 4K sector hard drives out of the box for the first partition, but subsequent partitions on a 4K drive are inexplicably not supported. Mac OS X users will be pleased to know that this OS supports 4K sector drives fully.

But back to the 4K sector situation. The solution other manufacturers have found is to get buyers of those 4K sector drives to use special 'alignment' software to re-align the sectors with what the OS is expecting to restore performance, but this is something that will take at least 30 minutes and could take up to two hours or longer depending on the amount of data on the drive.

While this doesn't sound like too much time, if you're an IT technician in a company with a fleet of computers receiving hard disk upgrades, it all adds up and in time costs (let alone the cost of that time), it's easy to see that time is money and this waste of time can be expensive.

Seagate gets around this problem by having its alignment software not available as something separate to be physically run, leaving you to wait, but instead has its own 'SmartAlign' technology built right in to the Barracuda Green's firmware, meaning you need to take no action whatsoever to take advantage of the 4K sector benefits.

Although competing 4K sector drives operate at about half a watt less power than the new Seagate Barracuda Green, they have much, much lower performance. There's a very simple reason for this. Competing drives spin at 5400 RPM, whereas the Barracuda Green spins at 5900 RPM.

Ask yourself what you want - a slow, green drive, or one that uses a tiny bit of extra power, but it still green, and has a faster max throughput and better benchmarked speeds? The Barracuda Green's tagline of 'green power that won't slow you down' is really quite apt.

So, as I said, the faster speed chews up a tiny bit of extra power, sure, but you get much better performance - and no need to run separate 4K alignment software.

Continued on page two, where you'll find pricing and more information, please read on!