Seagate unveils 10 TB capacity hard drives

ONCE upon a time, it used to be a dream to get your hands on a 10 TB hard drive if you wanted tonnes of space for your games or 4K videos at home, with that privilege initially reserved for those running a server.

Well, Seagate has turned that dream into reality by introducing a trio of 10 TB hard drives, including one that is designed for consumers and their desktops.

The 10 TB BarraCuda Pro, a brand name that was once done away with several years ago in favour of the “Desktop Hard Drive,” has been resurrected by Seagate for its line of consumer desktop and laptop hard drives, and it’s better than ever, featuring more than just high capacity — it’s high performance as well. The data storage firm has fitted the hard drive with an impressive 256 MB of cache, and it spins at 7,200 rpm. With that said, SSDs are still where it’s at it when it comes to high-performance and read speeds. As opposed to SSDs that can easily reach 1.5 Gbps read speeds, the BarraCuda Pro comes in at a comparatively meager 220 Mbps transfer rate.

However, while the BarraCuda Pro loses in performance (which isn’t even that bad, considering that it’s a hard drive), it wins in regard to capacity and price. The BarraCuda Pro, as mentioned before, is the world’s largest HD, with a 10 TB capacity, and it comes with a price of $534.99. Comparatively, the world’s largest SSD is Samsung’s 4 TB 850 EVO, which costs $1,500. The former is a meager five cents per gigabyte, whereas the latter is about 37 cents per gigabyte. So, how did Segate manage to make this 10 TB monster? The BarraCuda Pro uses Conventional Magnetic Recording, rather than sealing the drive and filling it with helium or exotic magnetic technology.

Interestingly, the HD is also built on a seven-platter design, which, in most cases, would mean higher power consumption due to the amount of spinning platters. Despite that, Seagate claims that the drive consumes only 6.8 watts during seek and 4.5 watts during idle, which means that it’s more efficient than most drives on the market.

As for the other models Seagate announced, the IronWolf and the SkyHawk, both also possess a 10 TB capacity, but neither is designed for general consumer use.