Tuesday, November 1st 2011
Seagate Streamlines Barracuda Product Family; Simplifies Selection for Consumers
Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and big capacities to help satisfy the explosive growth in content creation and consumption by businesses and consumers worldwide. The new Barracuda family makes it easier for consumers to find the product they need and reduces costs for Seagate's original equipment manufacturer and distribution channel customers by reducing the number of product qualifications and amount of inventory they need to manage.
"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."
Desktop PC performance is growing in importance as computer users consume and otherwise use more and more multimedia - a blend 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 hard drive performance often means a faster computer and quicker access to this content.
The new Barracuda hard 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 home and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to a massive 3TB.
The simplification of the Barracuda family comes as Seagate begins volume shipments of its 1TB-per-disk Barracuda hard drive. Seagate plans to end production of its Barracuda Green drive in February 2012. 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. 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 Specifications
The new Barracuda hard drive features a SATA 6 Gb/s interface, 7200 RPM spin speed and up to 64 MB 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 help the hard drive industry segue from the current 512-byte sector standard for hard drives to the new 4096-byte sector size. The new 4K standard enables the use of stronger error correction algorithms to maintain data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities.
Environmental Commitment
Seagate is committed to building hard drives to the highest quality and environmental standards. More than 70 percent of materials used in its storage products are recyclable, and all of its products are halogen-free and comply with the rigorous REACH standard. These and other initiatives at Seagate are what truly make a difference to the environment.
"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."
The new Barracuda hard 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 home and small-business RAID solutions. Capacities of the family range from 250GB to a massive 3TB.
The simplification of the Barracuda family comes as Seagate begins volume shipments of its 1TB-per-disk Barracuda hard drive. Seagate plans to end production of its Barracuda Green drive in February 2012. 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. 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 Specifications
The new Barracuda hard drive features a SATA 6 Gb/s interface, 7200 RPM spin speed and up to 64 MB 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 help the hard drive industry segue from the current 512-byte sector standard for hard drives to the new 4096-byte sector size. The new 4K standard enables the use of stronger error correction algorithms to maintain data integrity at higher storage densities and capacities.
Environmental Commitment
Seagate is committed to building hard drives to the highest quality and environmental standards. More than 70 percent of materials used in its storage products are recyclable, and all of its products are halogen-free and comply with the rigorous REACH standard. These and other initiatives at Seagate are what truly make a difference to the environment.
42 Comments on Seagate Streamlines Barracuda Product Family; Simplifies Selection for Consumers
And good luck with Toshiba, they shut down their hard drive line earlier this year... That is why there are 0 desktop drives available on newegg from them, and only 1 laptop drive.
And as YoukY63 pointed out(I knew I had read that article somewhere, just couldn't find it), the actual failure rates when sampling tens of thousands of drives are extremely low between the WD and Seagate and Samsung. So you really have no ground to stand on.I bought 3, all with the defective firmware, RMA'd one and got one with a non-defective firmware. The other two were flashed with the new firmware and worked flawlessly.
But, yes your experience is anecdotal, and the firmware did fix the problem. If it didn't fix your drives, then you probably flashed drives that didn't even have a firmware problem to begin with, with a firmware not designed for your drives, causing more harm than good.
Like i have said before. I mentioned that I have read and heard more re-occuring horror stories about Seagate drives then any other HDD manufacturer. WD have had problems but once they get it fixed, you tend not to hear anything from them for a long time as they sorted the problem out.
If a consumers keep complaining over and over again because drives keep on breaking, who are YOU to tell them they are full of shit?
your failure to answer my question proves my point.
A lot of useful information is shared over the internet.
TPU is one of the sites that share lots of information on PC hardware and customisation etc etc. IF everyone at TPU were to recommend an i5 setup, would you listen to our recommendations of thousands people or would you be a douche and do the complete opposite and get some old AMD Sempron because "the internets says so" ???
Your point is invalid. and you can tiptoe around the issue and troll as much as you like because youre so great you work in a pc repair store but that doesnt automaticly make what you say correct.
Yes I listen to the internets. and the internets have kept me from making bad mistakes when it comes to purchasing hardware. who are you to say otherwise?
- 3.65% Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD10EALS)
- 3.59% Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.C (HDS721010CLA332)
- 2.89% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1001FALS)
- 2.79% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD1002FAEX)
- 1.61% Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (ST31000528AS)
- 1.57% Western Digital Caviar Green (WD10EARS)
- 1.31% Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 (ST31000524AS)
- 1.27% Western Digital Caviar Blue (WD10EALX)
- 1.15% Samsung SpinPoint F3 (HD103SJ)
And 2TB drives:
- 5.53% Western Digital RE4-GP (WD2002FYPS)
- 5.07% Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 (HDS722020ALA330)
- 4.75% Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 (HDS723020BLA642)
- 4.42% Western Digital Caviar Black (WD2002FAEX)
- 3.48% Seagate Barracuda LP (ST32000542AS)
- 3.40% Seagate Barracuda XT (ST32000641AS)
- 3.05% Western Digital Caviar Green (WD20EARS)
- 2.98% Seagate Barracuda Green (ST2000DL003)
- 2.20% Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F4 (HD204UI)
Notice how Segate drives are doing pretty good here?
Anecdotal evidence is actually good for say holiday resorts and possibly when talking about support, but when it comes to technical stuff it's .. well bullcrap. Say you can find 500 horror stories about Seagate drives online. Or lets say 1000. That is a drop in the ocean when counting of the units they sell (in 2010 they sold 48 million drives in total). Even if you can find 10.000 horror stories online it's still just a drop.
I'm not trying to pick fights here, but it's just silly to take anecdotal stories about hardware failure seriously. The area where they are doing some good are stories about support.
He mentioned he works in a tech shop to infer that he deals with volume. I don't think I have to explain why having a sufficient data pool is crucial for proper statistics right? I slept through stats in high school and I still remember the basic elements.
I showed you my data. Come on, where are your data now? :rolleyes:
You said you bought the drives and flashed the firmware before even using them. Meaning the fixed firmware was already out, likely for a good while, before you even bought the drives. This means the drives likely came with good firmware already, and probably weren't even supposed to work with the firmware that you blindly flashed.
And I'm guessing that "criteria" you used was "its a 7200.11 drive, so I'ma flash that firmware"...
I take every complaint with a pinch of salt but at the same time I am very mindful and suspicious of that particular brand. Check in some of the seagate/samsung or other HDD based news posts. there are a few people that have posted about their bad experience with seagate, albiet it was probably posted a few months ago but there are a fair few posts on TPU about peoples personal experiences with that particular brand.
as always - no one is forcing anyone to buy anything they dont want to buy and after reading reviews online about whatever product we're after, Its common sense that we choose to go with something that has more good reviews.
to simply just say "because the internet says so" is a little strong. as tech sites (bar tomshardware) do some great reviews. and i buy my hardware based on peoples reviews, but that doesnt mean that i trust any random person that has something bad to say about a peice of hardware.
And I'm not saying that people aren't going to post about their problems with Seagate, but you seem to ignore the fact that people are also posting about their problems with WD/Samsung/Hitachi/etc. Just a quick trip over to the storage section of TPU shows the first page has WD Problem, Samsung Problem, Samsung Problem, Samsung Problem. Not a single Seagate issue on the first page, but 1 person with a WD problem and 3 people with Samsung problems with no Seagate issues. The only recent thread about someone having an issue with Seagate is Feaksavior's thread, and he uses exclusively Seagate, so bad luck is bound to hit, and another thread about a 7200.11 dying form July.
Still wouldnt recommend them
so to summarize: 1. they lie to your face on the status of your warranty claims to absolve their responsibilities, then they'll try to profiteer from the situation their faulty products have left you in. a company i'll have nothing to do with now or in the future, regardless of how their hardware improves.
thought i'd clear that up since you seemed to have been missing some facts.
Yup I did not say, that the HDD manufacturers are starting a natural disaster conspiracy.
:toast:
(FYI: Poking a little fun at conspiracy nuts, mixed with a little truth about this being the time of year prices go up, so dont run me up the flag pole guys!)Yup wrote about that a LONG time ago. Data replication is WAY more important than even RAID. After all if you have a fire or a power surge or something. your RAID1 stripe dont mean nuts. Having an external drive in your car, or an online backup... thats redundancy...
RAID is ONLY for servers or performance nuts :)