Seagate unveils 10TB BarraCuda
Seagate today announced a new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of capacity for desktops computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems.
The high-capacity drives, dubbed the Guardian Series, represent a 2TB increase over the capacity of previous Seagate hard drives in the consumer and small business category.
The Guardian series consists of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS applications and the Seagate SkyHawk for video surveillance systems.
Seagate also said it has resurrected the Barracuda brand for its line of consumer desktop and laptop hard drives, a name it did away with in favor of the “xxxDesktop Hard Drive” brand a few years ago. Seagate changed the spelling to “BarraCuda.”
The standard BarraCuda line now includes hard disk drives with spindle speeds ranging from 5,900rpm to 7,200rpm and capacities ranging from 500GB to 10TB. The drives also come with 16GB to 64GB of DRAM cache, depending on the overall capacity, and are being offered in 2.5-in. laptop form factors and 3.5-in. desktop sizes. The thinnest 2.5-in. BarraCuda drive is 7mm thick, small enough for ultrathin notebooks; it offers up to 2TB of capacity.
The updated BarraCuda drive line will offer sustained data transfer rates of up to 210MB/s. The 2TB models will retail for $81 and the 3TB models will sell for $100.
Seagate also announced a new drive for PC “enthusiasts,” the BarraCuda Pro, which comes in capacities of up to 10TB. The drive has a 7,200rpm spindle speed and a data transfer rate of up to 220MB/s, and comes with a five-year limited warranty. That’s more than twice the typical two-year BarraCuda HDD warranty.
“BarraCuda Pro offers the highest PC Compute spin speed at 7200 RPM for 3.5-in. HDD drives on the market,” said Chris Deardorff, a Seagate senior marketing strategist.
The drive also comes with Seagate’s Self-Encryption Drive (SED) technology, which password protects data on the drive but also allows users to crypto-erase it by changing the encryption key, ensuring no one can access it.
The BarraCuda Pro can sustain up to 55TB of data writes per year, according to Deardorff. The 10TB BarraCuda Pro will retail for $535.
Another hard drive announced today in the BarraCuda lineup is the FireCuda, which is aimed at gamers and comes in both 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. Form factors, and either 1TB or 2TB of capacities.
The FireCuda is a solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD), which means it uses a small amount (8GB) of NAND flash as a caching element to increase performance up to five times over standard BarraCuda drives. Data is first written to the NAND flash prior to the hard drive, which enables higher performance considering the spindle speed is just 5,900rpm. The drive has a maximum sustained read rate of 210MB/s.
Seagate xxxhas been selling SSHDs since 2011, so the FireCuda is not new technology. The FireCuda will retail for $85 for a 1TB drive, $110 for the 2TB model.
For small businesses, Seagate has refreshed its NAS drive lineup with the IronWolf brand. The IronWolf is aimed at NAS devices with one to 16 drive bays and comes with up to 10TB capacity and Seagate’s AgileArray (formely NASworks) software on it. AgileArray technology supports error recovery controls, power management and vibration tolerance for reliability when used in multi-bay NAS devices.
The IronWolf, which is rated for up to 180TB of writes per year, sports a higher resiliency than other Seagate drive models with a one million meantime before failure (MTBF) rating, according to Jennifer Bradfield, a Seagate senior director of product marketing.
The drive can also power down into a sleep mode while not being used, sipping only .8 watts of power compared with the 6.8 watts of power it uses while active.
The IronWolf HDDs offer a Rescue Data Recovery Service plan that protects against data loss from viruses, software issues, or mechanical and electrical breakdowns in a NAS or RAID environment. A failed drive can be sent back to Seagate where its in-house “Rescue Service” will attempt to retrieve data. The drive also comes with a three-year limited warranty. The IronWolf 10TB HDD will retail for $470.
Seagate’s new SkyHawk HDD lineup is a rebrand of the previous Sv35 series video surveillance hard drive. The new 7,200rpm drive comes with up to 10TB of capacity for storing up to 10,000 hours of HD video. It also comes with ImagePerfect firmware from MTC Technology.
The firmware, which allows the drive to be used by motion-sensing cameras, powers down the drive when it’s not in use to reduce power consumption and heat generation. It then powers up quickly to provide uninterrupted recording.
Like the IronWolf, the SkyHawk drives use rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and it can support up to 64 HD cameras — more than any other drive on the market, according to Aubrey Muhlach, Seagate’s Worldwide Surveillance Segment marketing manager.
Designed for modern, high-resolution systems running around the clock, SkyHawk drives also come with a data recovery services option.
The SkyHawk HDD supports up to 180TB worth of data writes per year, has a one million hour MTBF and a three-year limited warranty.
The 10TB SkyHawk HDD will retail for $460.
Source: ComputerWorld
