A new line of high-capacity hard drives now available from Seagate promise up to 10 TB of capacity for desktop computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems. The capacity of the drives in the company’s new Guardian Series represents a 2 TB increase over previous hard drives in Seagate’s line of consumer and small business storage hardware.
The new series of drives consist of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS applications and the Seagate SkyHawk for video surveillance systems. Those with long memories might recall that the Barracuda brand (with no capital C) was used previously for a line of Seagate consumer desktop and laptop hard drives before the brand name was replaced with Desktop Hard Drive.
The spindle speeds of the standard BarraCuda hard drives range from 5,900 rpm to 7,200 rpm and capacities range from 500 GB to 10 TB. These hard drives offer sustained data transfer rates of up to 210 MB/s and come with DRAM cache ranging from 16 GB to 64 GB, and they’re available in 2.5-inch laptop and 3.5-inch desktop sizes. The thinnest BarraCuda drive is 7mm thick, making it a fit for ultrathin notebooks. The 2 TB BarraCude models will retail for $ 81 and the 3 TB models will sell for $ 100.
The BarraCuda Pro has Seagate’s Self-Encryption Drive technology that protects data on the drive via a password but also lets a user change the drive encryption key so that others can’t access the data. The BarraCuda Pro can sustain up to 55 TB of data writes per year, according to Chris Deardorff, a Seagate senior marketing strategist.
For Smaller Businesses
The new IronWolf line of drives is intended for small businesses. The IronWolf is aimed at NAS devices containing between one to 16 drive bays and comes with up to 10 TB capacity at a cost of $ 470. The included AgileArray software, formerly called NASworks, supports error recovery controls, power management and vibration tolerance. The IronWolf is designed to handle 180 TB of writes per year, making it among the most durable drives offered by Seagate.
The IronWolf can power down into sleep mode while not being used, consuming only a fraction of the energy it needs while active. It also offers a Rescue Data Recovery Service plan that protects against data loss from viruses, software issues, or mechanical and electrical breakdowns. If a drive fails it can be sent back to Seagate, where in-house technicians will try to retrieve any lost data.
Video and Game Interest
Finally, the $ 460 SkyHawk lineup is aimed at surveillance services, with up to 10 TB of capacity for storing up to 10,000 hours of HD video. And the $ 85 FireCuda is aimed at gamers, coming in either 1 TB or 2 TB capacities.
Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, told us the SkyHawk and the FireCuda drives might get the most attention because they are useful for a few audiences.
“Video and photo professionals who work with 4K video and RAW images could use this type of capacity as they just can’t effectively store this much data effectively in the cloud — it takes too much time to upload and download,” said Moorhead. “[Also] gamers can benefit from this in that it could keep their entire Steam library, not just a subset installed on their desktop PCs.”
