Hard drives: Seagate goes green, Hitachi HDDs hit 3 TB

By Geoff Duncan Published December 14, 2010

We know, we know: for most people hard drives aren’t very exciting, but until the world is completely converted over to SSDs and ubiquitous always-reliable cloud storage they’re going go be part of our lives for a while. And storage developers Seagate and Hitachi have some new HDDs that can turn some heads: Seagate’s new Barracuda Green drives sport low power consumption and smart material usage, while Hitachi’s new 3 TB Deskstar hard drives can offer their complete storage capacity to 32-bit Windows XP machines that normally cap out at 2.2 TB—with no add-on hardware required.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

First up, the Seagate Barracuda Green hard drive is essentially a rebadge of Seagate’s earlier Barracuda LP, although the drive includes Seagate’s new SmartAlign technology that leverages the drive’s 4K sectors without requiring any additional hardware to optimize drive performance. Plus, the drives are low power with quiet performance—making them ideal for low-power PCs and storage systems—yet manage a 5,900 RPM spin rate. At least 70 percent of the materials used in the drives can be recycled, and all the drives use low-halogen components to reduce environmental impact. The drives are available in 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB capacities, with the 2 TB edition carrying a suggested price of $159.99.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Not to be outdone, Hitachi is launching hard drives with 3 TB capacities, including the HItachi XL Desktop External Hard Drive (which features USB 2.0 connectivity and a $249.99 price tag for the 3 TB version), and its new Deskstar 7K3000 desktop hard drive kit. The Deskstar 7K3000 kit comes with a special trick, however: the drive’s entire 3 TB capacity is available to 32-bit Windows XP systems, without the addition of any special hardware. (The drive is also fully compatible with other 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X—some users will just need to download drivers). Folks with Windows Vista or Windows 7 should consult Hitachi’s compatibility guide if they want to use the drive as a boot drive on a 32-bit system. The drive sports a 6 Gb/s SATA interface, a 64 MB buffer, 7,200 rpm spin rate, and comes with all the mounting screws and instructions necessary for installation. The 3TB version of the Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is available now for $249.99.

Former Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Topics

Computing

Google Earth’s AI misadventure lasted only a day. It was a tale of dangerous ignorance.

Nuclear reactors, tanks, and historical destruction on a life-like satellite map? Yeah, that's bad.

Nano Banana AI image generator representation.

Technology behemoths are clearly not reading the room, or they are just moving faster than they should when it comes to AI deployment. Google has already stuffed its Gemini AI in every corner of its software stack, from Android to daily productivity tools like Gmail that are used by hundreds of millions of users every day. AI is everywhere. Not all of it is bad, mind you. But in a few places, it just feels forced.

In its latest AI-fication experiment, the company targeted Google Earth. The idea was to let the audience use its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator and make images that can be placed on the map view. On paper, it's a cool idea. What would the Colosseum of Rome look like in your urban neighborhood? Yeah, fun stuff like that.

Computing

AMD is apparently gearing up to raise GPU prices right after Nvidia’s steep hike

AMD has reportedly told AIB partners about a price hike that goes into effect in. August.

AMD RX 7800

AMD is next in line to raise the asking price of its Radeon GPUs, merely days after the news of a similar hike coming for Nvidia graphics cards started making waves. As per ChannelGate on Weibo (h/t VideoCardz), AMD has informed its board partners that the price of GPU and memory bundles will go up by at least 10% in August.

Is a similar price hike coming for standalone graphics cards? I won't be surprised if that happens. The situation is so bad that AMD is planning to bring back graphics cards with 4GB of onboard memory. AMD just introduced the RX 9050 GPU, which costs $279. Notably, it's just $20 less than the RX 9060 XT that offers double the graphics memory.

Computing

Microsoft will make Windows work well with just 8GB RAM. We desperately need it

The dream of a reliable and affordable Windows laptop hinges on the next milestone at Microsoft.

Surface laptop on wooden table

The year 2026 has marked a huge course correction for Microsoft after years of frustrating users with plenty of confusing processes, unoptimized UI elements, and just the generous bloatware that can bring any Windows system to a crawl. Microsoft has finally shifted into a new phase. From fixing the right-click behavior to speeding up the Search system, the company has fixed plenty of papercuts.

The next major milestone is making Windows 11 run smoothly on Windows PCs with just 8GB of RAM. That directly means entry-level and budget laptops will at least get the basics right, even if that means sacrificing the on-device AI bells and whistles. Let's face it. The increasingly AI-first approach to computing on a Windows 11 machine is a little too taxing on the hardware at hand.