Seagate is streamlining its flagship family of desktop drives under a single product that hones in on performance and big capacities.
Seagate said that 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."
However, Seagate's plan to cut down its Barracuda desktop hard drives to just one core model line could be related to a supply issue. The simplification comes just as Seagate is facing ramifications from Thai flooding. Simplifying the line could help Seagate maximize the use of its reduced production levels.
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 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.
The new Barracuda hard drive features a SATA 6GB/second interface, 7200RPM spin speed and up to 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 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.