Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive Review

With the massive amounts of digital content now at our disposals, spend enough time in front of a system, and eventually it'll require a storage upgrade. We live in a digital world where games take up more storage space, cameras generate larger images, and camcorders produce higher definition videos than ever before. It's only a matter of time before even the average user saturates the drive in their PC. Throwing a SSD into the system as an OS drive will undoubtedly improve its performance, but it doesn't address the need for more storage. That's why the need for traditional hard drives remains strong, and consumers welcome advances in technology that provide additional capacity, reduced power consumption, and lower costs.

Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB Hard Drive

Today we take a look at the Barracuda Green 2TB hard drive from Seagate. Previously, the company's low power drives were designated with the LP nomenclature. But Seagate has made the change to a more recognizable industry standard naming convention. The 2TB Green drive sports a 5900 RPM spindle speed, SATA 6 GB/s interface, 64 MB cache, Advanced Format technology, and Seagate SmartAlign for easy integration. Do all of these features entice you enough to put the Barracuda Green on your upgrade list? Need more information? Read on to find out how well this drive performs as we run it through a series of benchmarks and give you our take on its strengths and weaknesses.

There are a few things worth noting about the Barracuda Green. It features the same 5900 RPM speed as previous generation Barracuda LP models, which is what makes it a low power product. But naturally, it should also provide faster performance than comparable green drives operating at 5400 RPM. Combine the speed advantage with higher aerial density from utilizing only three platters (667GB each) and the Barracuda Green targets the needs of users with a variety of system types. It’s also Seagate’s first 3.5-inch drive with Advanced Format (4K sectors) and Seagate’s unique SmartAlign technology.  We'll dig into those features on the following page so let's get to work.