SEAGATE BARRACUDA PRO 14TB HDD
Massive storage for regular desktop PCs.
The exponential increase in data storage requirements over the last decade or so has been handled by regular increases in hard drive capacities. Multiple HDD vendors supply them to cloud providers (who get the main benefits from advancements in hard drive technologies), but, Seagate is the only one to also focus on the home consumer/prosumer market. In the last three generations, we have seen that Seagate has been the first to target the desktop storage market with their highest capacity drives. The 10TB BarraCuda Pro was released in Q3 2016, and the 12TB version in Q4 2017. Now from Seagate we have the 14TB model.
The Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB is a 7200RPM SATAIII (6 Gbps) hard drive with a 256MB multisegmented DRAM cache. It features eight PMR platters with a 1077 Gb/in2 areal density in a sealed enclosure filled with helium. The main change compared to the 12TB version introduced last year is the usage of Seagate’s second-generation two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) heads, allowing for higher areal density (1077 Gb/in2 vs. 923 Gb/in2 without TDMR).
According to Seagate, the 14TB BarraCuda Pro typically draws around 6.9W, making it one of the most power efficient highcapacity 3.5-inch hard drives in the market. It targets creative professionals with high-performance desktops, home servers and/or direct-attached storage units. It is meant for 24x7 usage (unlike traditional desktop-class hard drives) and carries a workload rating of 300TB/year, backed by a five year warranty. The drive also comes with a bundled data-recovery service (available for two years from date of purchase).
Random accesses are never the strong points of hard drives, and we see that the BarraCuda Pro delivers around 69 IOPS for 4K random reads and 222 IOPS for 4K random writes. The random read performance is very similar to the performance of the 12TB version from last year, while the random write performance receives a boost up from 191 IOPS.
Consumers opting for drives such as the 12TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro typically need high-capacity local storage for holding and editing/processing largesized multimedia files. The 14TB BarraCuda Pro came in with a sequential read of 263MB/s and 261MB/s sequential write. The numbers are in the same ballpark as the 12TB version from last year. These numbers are better than the ones we obtained for the 10TB version from 2016, but, fall a little short of the performance of the 12TB drive from last year. The temperature of the unit at the end of the transfers (more than 250GB of traffic) rose by less than 4°, pointing to the power-efficiency of the platform.
Desktop hard drives are typically not rated for 24x7 operation, but, the BarraCuda Pro series bucks that trend. In addition to a 300TB/yr workload rating, Seagate also provides a five year warranty and, with product registration, two years of data recovery services.
Similar to the 10TB and 12TB versions that we had evaluated in the last couple of years, the 14TB version leaves very little to complain about. It doesn’t deliver any marked performance improvements over either the 10TB or the 12TB versions released in the previous years. However, it does enable users to have more local / direct-attached storage per 3.5-inch drive bay than ever before at consumer price points.