Seagate's 10TB Barracuda Pro is the world's largest consumer hard drive
Image: Gordon Mah UngGot a thirst for more storage on your PC? Seagate has heard you and Tuesday morning introduced the world’s largest capacity consumer hard drive for desktop users.
The 10TB Barracuda Pro doesn’t play just the capacity card though. Seagate also aimed to make it a high-performance hard drive, fitting it with a massive 256MB of cache. The drive also spins along at 7,200rpm rather than the typical, lower-cost 5,400rpm large drives.
Of course, “performance hard drive” may sound like an oxymoron in this age of SSDs that can easily hit 1.5GBps read speeds, but all things considered, the 3.5-inch Barracuda Pro is still fairly peppy, with rated a 220MBps sustained transfer rate. Well, for a hard drive anyway.
The Barracuda Pro uses Conventional Magnetic Recording and doesn’t resort to sealing the drive and filling it with helium or exotic magnetic technology to achieve its high capacity. Officials say it’s built on a seven-platter design, which usually means more power consumption due to the number of spinning platters. But in this case, Seagate says it’s one of the more efficient drives around.
According to Seagate, the drive consumes just 6.8 watts during seek and 4.5 watts during idle, which indeed makes it fairly low-power by hard drive standards.
The operative word in all of this is “consumer,” as 10TB hard drives for enterprise have been around for some time. Western Digital’s HGST began shipping a 10TB helium-filled model in late 2015. Seagate followed suit with its own 10TB helium-filled drive this January.
Both of those 3.5-inch hard drives are aimed corporate use in servers and typically cost more. The 10TB Seagate Enterprise, for example, sells for about $600. Western Digital’s HGST version is in the $730 range on the street.
The new 10TB Barracuda Pro has a list price of $534.99, which means street pricing should be considerably lower than an enterprise 10TB drive.
How does that compare in the SSD wars? Samsung’s recently announced “world’s largest SSD” costs $1,500 for 4TB, which makes it about 37 cents a gigabyte. The new Seagate Barracuda Pro comes in at about 5 cents a gigabyte.
Still, it’s not exactly cheap. Seagate also announced a couple other 10TB models that cost less but aren’t geared toward desktop performance: The 10TB IronWolf is for NAS applications, with a list price of $469.99, and the 10TB SkyHawk drive for video-surveillance use is priced at $459.99.
The SkyHawk and IronWolf feature shorter three-year warranties while the Barracuda Pro will maintain the same five-year warranty as the enterprise drives. All three drives will be available with only SATA interfaces.
Gordon Mah UngSeagate’s new 10TB Barracuda Pro runs on the SATA interface and will pack 256MB of cache, run at 7,200rpm, and come with a five-year warranty.
