News - Seagate intros low-power Barracuda LP 3.5in hard drives

[HEXUS]

Coinciding with Earth Day, Seagate turns Western Digital 'green' with envy.

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[Funkstar]

Release dates? Prices?

Seems like a waste of a press release to me. Oh actually, they'll probably just recycle it when they are actually ready to release these drives.

[Nelviticus]

Sticking my neck out here, perhaps I'm a little cynical and more of a performance hound, but I'd pay the extra ~5W per-drive power consumption and go for something like the Caviar Blue. Used 40 hours a week and 50 weeks of the year, the total additional electricity cost would be around £1.50

For a desktop, yes, but what about for a NAS? I have a little Thecus NAS with a 1GB Samsung F1 that runs 24 hours a day and I've been wondering recently whether the reduced performance of a lower-power drive would be noticeable in a NAS. How about a Hexus feature on whether it's worth shelling out for high-speed drives for a NAS?

[Funkstar]

In the little consumer oriented NAS boxes, even a slow drive is going to be bottle necked by the processor of the NAS. You could put a couple of laptop drives in there and probably not change the performance. Likewise, putting a couple of SSDs in there isn't going to speed it up.

Large SoHo NAS solutions are another matter. Things like the N7700/N880 from Thecus could benefit from faster drives.

Though if you are going to throw serious money at it, you are far better building you own server.

[Methanoid]

For a desktop, yes, but what about for a NAS? I have a little Thecus NAS with a 1GB Samsung F1 that runs 24 hours a day and I've been wondering recently whether the reduced performance of a lower-power drive would be noticeable in a NAS. How about a Hexus feature on whether it's worth shelling out for high-speed drives for a NAS?

I think you're right. No noticeable different when the CPU probably limits your transfer speeds. Eg Bufalo Linkstation 400mhz ARM = 12.5Mb/s but with 1.2Ghz ARM 30Mb/s - neither of which will matter with any modern HDD.

That's why I have a Samsung F2 (5400rpm) about to go into my NAS - lower power and noise levels but same performance in a NAS.