Seagate has announced its latest "green" hard drives which goes under the name of Barracuda LP, in which the LP of course stands for Low Power. Seagate claims a power usage reduction of 44 percent over standard desktop drives, but this isn't really the feature that makes these drives stand out to us.

Instead it's something completely different, the speed at which the platters are spinning at, as the Barracuda LP is the first drive that we've ever heard of that features a 5,900rpm spindle speed. This doesn't seem to be vastly faster than a 5,400rpm drive, but Seagate begs to differ. However, Seagate hasn't provided any benchmark figures to back this up, so we're just going to have to wait for some independent testing to see how well these new drives really perform.

The Barracuda LP series is also made from 70 percent recyclable materials and should run cooler and quieter than 7,200rpm drives. Size wise you're looking at 1, 1.5 and 2TB, so there's nothing to complain about here in terms of capacity. Add 32MB cache to that and an average latency of 5.5ms and the Barracuda LP looks quite tempting. The 1.5 and 2TB models draw on average 6.8W while the 1TB version sips slightly less juice at 5.7W. The idle power for the first two models is 5.5W, with the 1TB model again coming in lower at 3W.

The 1TB Barracuda LP5900.12 will set you back around €95, the 1.5TB model goes for around €125, while the 2TB model will cost you about €280 making the 1.5TB model looking like the best value for money out of the three. They're comparatively pricey, as you can get a Barracuda 7200.12 for about €15 less than the 1TB LP5900.12, while a 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 will cost a similar amount less than the 1.5TB LP5900.12. However, the 2TB model seems to be the fastest consumer 2TB drive on the market and costing about the same as Seagate's competitor's 5,400rpm drives.

You can find the Seagate product page here