Seagate BarraCuda Pro and FireCuda
PERFORMANCE AND CAPACITY FOR A PERFECT GAMING RIG
If you’re a die-hard gamer with a massive Steam library, Seagate’s new Guardian Series range of HDDs, featuring the BarraCuda Pro and FireCuda drives, can help supply large amounts of cost effective storage.
A brand you may already be familiar with is BarraCuda, which has provided reliable, fast and value for money storage for over 20 years. If you’ve built a computer over that time, chances are you’ve installed a BarraCuda drive in your rig. The newest iteration of this classic brand is split into two models - the BarraCuda and BarraCuda Pro.
The Barracuda Pro is the top of the line HDD in Seagate’s Guardian Series, with 6TB, 8TB and a crazy 10TB of capacity available in a single drive. A massive 256MB cache is the star feature of the BarraCuda Pro, providing a huge speed boost when accessing frequently used les and cuts down game loading times.
PRETTY QUICK FOR A HARD DRIVE!
Thanks to the tight 10TB platter density, 7200RPM spindle speed and large 256MB cache, the BarraCuda Pro is one of the fastest 3.5-inch HDDs on the market, achieving a maximum sustained transfer rate of 220MB/s.
The combination of speed and massive capacity means you no longer have to make the tough decision on which games to uninstall when Steam has their next sale. Just install whatever you want and play it on demand. No more waiting to download 7GB over ADSL because you ran out of hard drive space – just download the game once and keep it there. You’ve got up to 10TB, install everything!
The standard Barracuda drive comes in sizes from 500GB to to 4TB with up to 7200 RPM spindle speed and up to 64MB cache. Whilst not as speedy as the BarraCuda Pro, they’re still excellent for cheap and reliable bulk storage of whatever media you keep on your PC – movies, TV shows or music. Seagate offers a 3-year warranty on the BarraCuda drives and a 5-year warranty on the BarraCuda Pro.
BEST OF BOTH WORLDS
SSDs may be all the rage, but if you’re a die-hard gamer with a massive Steam library, you just can’t t all those games on a single SSD without paying thousands of dollars for a large capacity version.
This hybrid SSD and HDD is perfect for gamers who still want loads of space for all their games, but also require fast SSD-like loading times.
These combination SSD and HDD units are called SSHDs (solid state hybrid drive). The FireCuda is paired with a 7200RPM drive with a 256MB cache, so even if the data you need isn’t on the SSD, it’ll still be fairly quick to access, as opposed to the rather sedate 5900RPM drives wioth much smaller cache currently available.
the BarraCuda Pro is one of the fastest 3.5-inch HDDs on the market
The FireCuda combines an 8GB MLC SSD with 1TB or 2TB HDD so you can enjoy the best of both SSD and HDD worlds. Seagate provide a 5-year warranty on the FireCuda SSHD, giving you peace of mind that any trouble you face will be taken care of.
MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE
Performance on an SSHD is much faster than a standard HDD, with game load times 5x faster and boot times in seconds instead of minutes. An ideal application for an SSHD is in a small form factor gaming rig where there just isn’t space for two drives, but you still want a fast, large disk for your games.
The main bene t of the FireCuda is that no setup or drivers are required to make full use of the SSHD features. It simply appears as a single, normal hard drive to any operating system. With a RAID setup, there’s always setup or drivers required that can sometimes cause issues.
The FireCuda’s Flash boost is automatically con gured and arranged by the drive’s on-board hardware controller. The FireCuda intelligently decides what les, applications and operating system components are accessed the most often and moves those to the SSD for quick access. It’ll also move items back to the HDD if they’re no longer required.
Both the BarraCuda and FireCuda storage solutions from Seagate are available now from your favourite PC hardware store. For more information on the entire Guardian Series of drives, visit www.seagate.com