Seagate announces new Barracuda desktop drive family

NEW DELHI, INDIA: 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 Rajesh Khurana, country manager India & SAARC, Seagate Technology. “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 –available in India from November – 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.