Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST2000DL003

by Seagate

• A unique 5900-RPM platform delivers the fastest performance of any drive available
• Seagate SmartAlign technology provides the benefits of the new Advanced Format 4K sector standard without the hassles - not utilities, no extra steps
• Plenty of capacity for storage-hungry applications
• The SATA 6Gb/s interface and 64MB cache maximize performance, especially in cache-intensive applications
• Best-Fit Applications include: High-capacity desktop storage, Direct Attached Storage devices - USB/Firewire/eSata, Network Attached Storage devices and Windows storage servers, PCs

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 4 x 1 inches ; 1.1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B004C0WVP6
• Item model number: ST2000DL003
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (189 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: November 15, 2010

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Barracuda® Green hard drives from Seagate® save you time. The fastest green drive performance enabled by the industries only 5900 RPM spin speed means the fastest data throughput of and "green" drive on the market. SmartAlign technology means you get the benefits of the new Advanced Format 4K sector standard without the hassles of software alignment utilities required by other drives. SmartAlign makes Seagate Advanced Format hard drives look and act just like they always have. With Barracuda Green you get fast performance, cool quite operation and no-hassle integration. It's the green power drive that won't slow you down.
 

Seagate® Barracuda® Green

Green Power that won't slow you down Fast SATA 6Gb/s interface backwards compatible with SATA 3Gb/s High capacity drives up to 2.0TB Up to 20% faster than competitive "green" drives Features Seagate SmartAlign technology for a simple & invisible, transition to Advanced Format (4K sector) drives The world's most versatile 3.5-inch drive for desktops, external enclosures, and network attach storage (NAS). The Barracuda Green drive with its unique 5900 RPM is the green power drive that won't slow you down. Seagate Barracuda Green drives are perfect for: Entry Level PCs All-in-One PCs Slimline / Low Power PCs External USB, FireWire, or eSATA storage enclosures Network Attach Storage (NAS) solutions Why choose the Seagate Barracuda Green? Up to 20% faster that other green drives with its unique 5900 RPM spin speed 2.0TB & 1.5TB capacities perfect for desktops, external storage, and NAS boxes Up to 40% lower power than other 7200 RPM alternatives Seagate SmartAlign™ technology provides a transition to 4K sectors without the need for software utilities

	Why you need a drive with Seagate SmartAlign technology? In 2011, all drive manufactures' new drive models will transition to a new standard called Advanced Format. Thus, all customers will be forced to adapt to Advanced Format drives. How you choose to adapt can negatively impact your drive's performance. Performance on un-aligned Advanced Format hard drives can drop by 10-25%! Alignment software take extra time and extra integration steps Seagate SmartAlign technology eliminates the need for alignment software SmartAlign technology preserve drive performance

Seagate Barracuda Family Hard Drives

Barracuda® Green Low Power 5900 RPM drives with 1.5TB and 2.0TB capacities

Barracuda® Mainstream 7200 RPM drives with capacities from 160GB to 1.0TB click here

Barracuda® XT High performance 7200 RPM drive with 2.0TB capacity click here

How much will it store?
Capacity	Digital Music (Hours)	Digital Photos (Files)	Digital Videos (Hours)	DVD Quality (Movies)	HD Video (Hours)
2.0 TB	33,320	640,000	2,000	500	500
1.5 TB	24,990	480,000	1,500	375	375
		Average file size using cameras highest resolution JPEG mode		Based on standard 2 hour movie	Based on H.264 compression at a 6.75Mbs bitrate

Barracuda Green - Specifications

Specifications	2TB1	1.5TB1
Model Number	ST2000DL003	ST1500DL003
Interface Options	SATA 6Gb/s NCQ	SATA 6Gb/s NCQ
Performance
Spindle Speed (RPM)	5900	5900
Cache, Multisegmented (MB)	64	64
SATA Transfer Rates Supported (Gb/s)	6.0	6.0
Average Latency (ms)	4.16	4.16
Average Seek, Typical Read (ms)	12	12
Average Seek, Typical Write (ms)	13	13
Power On to Ready (sec)	<10	<10
Configuration/Organization
Heads/disks	6/3	6/3
Bytes per Sector	4096	4096
Voltage
Voltage Tolerance, Including Noise (5V)	+10%/-7.5%	+10%/-7.5%
Voltage Tolerance, Including Noise (12V)	+10%/-7.5%	+10%/-7.5%
Reliability/Data Integrity
Load/Unload Cycles (25°C, 50% Humidity)	300,000	300,000
Nonrecoverable Read Errors per Bits Read, Max	1 per 10E14	1 per 10E14
Annualized Failure Rate (AFR)	0.34%	0.34%
Power-On Hours	8760	8760
Limited Warranty (years)	3	3
Power Management
Operating Mode, Typical (W)	5.8	7.15
Idle Mode (W)	4.5	5.0
Standby Mode (W)	0.5	0.93
Sleep Mode (W)	0.5	0.93
Startup Current +12V Peak (A±10%)	2.0	2.0
Environmental
Temperature
Operating (°C)	0 to 60	0 to 60
Nonoperating (°C)	-40 to 70	-40 to 70
Shock (Gs)
Operating: 2ms (°C)	80	80
Nonoperating: 2ms (°C)	300	300
Physical
Height (in/mm)	26.1/1.028	26.1/1.028
Width (mm/in)	101.6/4.0	101.6/4.0
Depth (mm/in)	146.00/5.75	146.00/5.75
Weight (g/lb)	622/1.371	622/1.371

1 One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity.

Barracuda Green - Models

Model Number	Capacity	Interface Options
ST2000DL003 ST1500DL003	2TB 1.5TB	SATA 6Gb/s NCQ SATA 6Gb/s NCQ

Product Description

Barracuda Green hard drives from Seagate save you time. The fastest green drive performance offered with SmartAlign technology for Advanced Format means your drive performs faster and makes the transition to 4K sector technology a snap! Save energy, go fast and skip the software utilities required by other Advanced Format drives. With Barracuda Green hard drives you get fast performance, cool quiet operation and no-hassle integration. It's the green power drive that won't slow you down.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

244 of 256 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Caution on Seagate drives lifespan September 18, 2011

By Mark James

I have bought/sold Seagate drives for 25 years. I have recommended Seagate for most of those years. I am in the storage business and have a lot of direct experience with drives.

The problem I am discovering is a greatly reduced reliability in Seagate 1.5 and 2TB disks. I currently have about a dozen 2TB Seagates in active use. 7 of them are beginning to fail, in under 4,000 hours of use. These are disks which were burned in by certifying them for about 3 days with an intensive read/write pattern, to eliminate early failure disks. In the general disk population, I have also seen a high failure rate. This is unacceptable.

Google performed a study using over 100,000 disks a few years back. Google found statistical differences in failure rates between manufacturers, that they did not publish. They also noted that "enterprise" drives did not result in longer lifespans. They found NO correlation between heavy duty or light duty use in failure. What Google did report was that a handful of SMART parameters could be used to predict drives that would soon fail. Among these are reallocated sectors. Once a drive begins reallocating, they generally fail within 6 months or less. There are SMART utilities which are starting to implement this knowledge and alerting users to predicted failures.

For a long time, Seagate was the premium brand of hard drives, along with Hitachi. They may still be. However, this failure rate on the 1.5 and 2TB drives, in addition to the major firmware flaw on the 1.5TB drives (Many customers lost data on the 1.5TB drives, where drives suddenly failed from a firmware flaw), makes me very cautious on Seagate now....

I am recommending Hitachi for now, they will cost a little more, but until more data is in, be alert if Seagates are installed and perhaps avoid them in servers and mission critical installations. I have no data yet on the 3TB drives. Read more ›

105 of 108 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Drive, Great Performance, But......Watch out...... March 26, 2011

By ShopperGuy1234

In my server, I have 6 2TB drives installed, in 3 sets of RAID 1 configuration. I wanted to replace 2 of the old drives with these ones.
I purchased and installed and immediately noticed that on Power ON, it would take few seconds for my Server to reach POST screen, which is surprising. I have 850W power supply, and 2 video cards, but still have plenty of spare power capacity left.
So I disconnected these 2 new drives, and guess what, system immediately comes to POST on power up.
I did some research and found that this model drives draws more power on start up. Once started, they behave nicely, just the initial power ON current draw is higher than other drives. Long story short, I swapped the drives from my NAS enclosure to my server and installed these 2 drives in my NAS.

PROS:
1) whopping 64MB cache....!!!!
2) Fast SATA 6Gb/s interface
3) Sustained high data transfer rate, (recreating RAID was much faster on these drives)
4) Light weight since it has only 3 platters
5) Runs cool, even with sustained data in/out operation
6) Quiet, even when transferring, reading/writing data
7) Cheap

CONS:
1) Higher start-up current draw
2) 4K sector size, which may or may not be a problem for you, depending on your application, OS etc.
3) Only 3 year warranty

48 of 49 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Terrific, fast, very quiet February 12, 2011

By AP

Amazon Verified Purchase

I purchased four of these to replace four 500gb SATA 2 drives by the same manufacturer in a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ machine. While I cannot attest to the new SATA 3 (6 gb/sec) speeds (the ReadyNAS is SATA 2), the new firmware from Netgear required me to do a factory reset on the device, and upon boot it recognized the new 4k format being used by this drive. After the drives were striped and the volume redundant, I was able to copy about a terabyte of data off my local machine in about 12 hours (with breaks in between).

The new drives run cooler than the old 500's, are amazingly quiet, and fast-- so far I'm quite impressed with their performance (especially with the 64mb cache). While I haven't seen their long-term viability yet, I'm pleasantly surprised by how well they work.

Bjorn3d has a good review of the drive here:

[...]

Recommended.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Drives for NAS August 30, 2011

By The Gadgetman

Amazon Verified Purchase

I purchased 5 of these along with Synology DS1511+ NAS from Amazon back in April, 2011 for my home. I can't say about how they perform as internal drives for a desktop or in an USB/eSATA external enclosure, but I can definitely state that they work great as NAS drives. I have these configured as RAID6, which means you can lose up to 2 disks and still have your volume intact (but at point you won't have fault tolerance). The NAS I got itself is a high-efficient unit, and combined with these green drives it definitely consumes less power than the two servers that I replaced...and I have 5.44TB of fault tolerant storage accessible from my 10 PCs/Macs.

I saw other reviewers commenting about them not being "high-performance" drives. That is correct, this drive was never intended to be used as your primary drive for your system. If you're looking for a high-performance drives, you should definitely look for 7,200/10,000rpm drives with 16/32MB cache.

However, when used in a RAID configuration, these drives will deliver high-performance with overall reduced power consumption. In my NAS I was able to sustain around 160MB/S throughput writing to NAS over gigabit network (and even faster reading from it). There's nothing low-performance about these drives when used in a proper setting. The drive is also quiet. Standing next to my NAS, I can't hear any drive noise even with 5 drives side-by-side.

Bottom line, don't purchase drives purely based on price and capacity. You don't buy Prius for high-performance, why expect high-performance from a "Green" drive? Identify what you're going to do with it, then look for qualifying drives for best result. I would have never purchased this to be used in my desktop (for performance) and neither should you.