 See this? Two dimes right there. That's how much money you save per year going with a 5400 RPM drive or a 5900 RPM drive versus a 7200 RPM drive that is optimized for power efficiency. At least that is what Seagate is claiming is the reason that they are switching from having a green or an eco-friendly optimized lower RPM lower performance storage drive and then a middle-of-the-range sort of still purely magnetic storage so sort of Seagate's strategy going forward is going to be a little bit different but having a green drive versus a 7200 RPM somewhat performance drive and then a higher-end drive so in the past they had the Barracuda 5900 RPM drive they had the Barracuda 7200 RPM drive and then they had the Barracuda XT which was a 7200 RPM drive with better performance more tuning etc etc well now Seagate is doing away with that three-tiered approach and they are going with only a single pure magnetic drive at least sometime in the future so right now they still have the Barracuda this is an eval unit so hence the labeling on it and they're still going to have the Barracuda XT but the XT is going to be a hybrid drive in the future and they are completely doing away with the lower RPM drives because Seagate says that for the savings and for the performance reduction it is simply not worth the slight decrease in cost that a 5400 or 5900 RPM drive provides because in terms of manufacturing they're actually very very similar also in terms of the testing and validation process they take longer to validate because they spin slower so you actually on the manufacturing level are not really saving very much money at all so here we go this is code name Granada this is a 7200 RPM this is going to be the Barracuda drive moving forward and then there will be the Barracuda XT at some point in the future it has a 64 meg cache which is all fine and good but what's really interesting about this drive is the fact that Seagate now has 1 terabyte platters so what do 1 terabyte platters mean 1 terabyte platters mean that your 2 terabyte drive is going to be faster due to the increased density of the data storage on the drive so it's going to be faster than your old 2 terabyte drive and it's also going to be more reliable than your old 2 terabyte drive and the reason for that is that it actually has fewer parts inside so fewer points of failure compared to a drive that has a ton of platters and a ton of read heads in order to achieve the capacity that it has achieved now in terms of the actual physical drive itself you're going to notice this looks an awful lot like a standard three and a half inch drive you got your SATA power you got your SATA 6 gigabit per second or 6 yeah 6 gigabit per second 600 megabit per second no 6 gigabit per second you wrote 600 megabit per second either way you've got your SATA 3 6 gigabit per second interface here you got a couple little jumpers there you got your standard mounting holes all that good stuff so what is this really about this video isn't really about the unboxing or d-bagging of this particular drive this is more about Seagate's refocus on what is best for the consumer so what they're saying is you know what enough of this 20 cents of savings per year nonsense because honestly you're probably losing far more than that in terms of productivity just waiting around for your data to be accessed let's not you know charge more for the performance drive if it costs as much to manufacture and it uses as much power almost it's actually slightly less power efficient than a low rpm drive but let's not charge more for it if it doesn't actually cost us more to produce so they're going ahead they're saying let's simplify things for the consumer we're going to have one drive in a variety of capacities and then on the performance side we're going to do hybrid drives we're going to add caching to them they're going to be legitimately much higher performance than a standard 7200 rpm drive and that's the only differentiation that they're going to have so I say thumbs up to Seagate for simplifying things for the consumer and simplifying things that really add every level at their own level at the retailer level they don't have to have as many skews you want a hard drive here's a hard drive you want a hybrid drive here's a hybrid drive that's pretty much it so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the barracuda cdu unit so I don't know what that stands for but there you go and don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos