There’s a general rule with hard drives: spin faster, get better performance, use more power. “Green” hard drives take the opposite tack: they spin slower, and use less power, like Seagate’s new Barracuda LP.
Its RPM rating is a rather odd 5900rpm—between the a laptop drive’s standard 5400rpm and a standard desktop drive’s 7200rpm (performance drives go up to 10,000rpm but are obviously power monsters). That 18 percent speed reduction is how it achieves most of its power savings over regular hard drives, not through green alchemy. Which means it’s less suited to your high performance gaming rig than snugly slotted into your NAS or simply dedicated to straight media storage in your PC. [Cnet]
