This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

Seagate has announced a new gear up of 12TB difficult drives for desktop and NAS drives. The new 12TB volumes are part of the BarraCuda Pro, IronWolf, and IronWolf Pro production families. The BarraCuda Pro family of drives all spin at 7200 RPM and carry v-twelvemonth warranties; the new 12TB drives are a straightforward extension of the previous 10TB hardware.

Similar all BarraCuda Pro drives over 4TB, the 12TB drive offers 256MB of disk cache, though its listed sustained sequential transfer rate of 250MB/southward is slightly college than the 220MB/due south on earlier drives. The improvement is unlikely to make a major divergence in real-world tests. Synthetic tests tend to pick up gains in sequential read/write performance much more obviously than desktop applications. In theory, the BarraCuda Pro can burst up to 6Gbps, but that'south unlikely to have an impact on observed performance. In short, this is a well-warrantied bulldoze with 12TB of storage that won't necessarily be much faster than what you're using now, but definitely holds about 20% more porn data than previous drives.

The gap between the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS drives is somewhat smaller. Both drive families rotate at 7200 RPM, with a three-twelvemonth warranty on IronWolf products and a 5-twelvemonth warranty on IronWolf Pro. Data recovery service (for two years) is included with the IronWolf Pro, which is a nice additional feature to see on a professional person bulldoze, even though ideally you'll never need it. Amazon shows a list price on the BarraCuda Pro of $525, according to PCMag, with the IronWolf variant at $487 and the IronWolf Pro at $530.

Seagate-Feature

Deject calculating is large news these days, only a personal NAS or fill-in solution can make a lot of sense.

Hitting these high storage volumes without breaking the depository financial institution is increasingly important to the HDD market, even if $525 is a swell deal of money by desktop storage standards. That works out to roughly four cents per GB, which is in line with historic HDD pricing at much lower capacities. The gap between SSDs and HDDs keeps shrinking, nonetheless–1TB SSDs are now every bit little equally $259. While that's still well-nigh half dozen.5x more than expensive, in that location's a indicate of diminishing return at which a given SSD capacity will just exist "enough" for about people's utilize.

We've gotten to the betoken where it's possible to look forward and observe that while a 12TB SSD might offering far more than storage per dollar for photographers, video editors, and the like, nigh consumers would be fine for a 1TB SSD at a chip more than one-half the price. Obviously there are exceptions, but this explains some of why the hard drive industry has been pushing and so hard to focus on other markets. NAS backups, cold storage, surveillance, and enterprise databases will still be relevant markets long after the consumer space has migrated to SSDs.

I more thing worth noting: While we've focused hither on discussing these 12TB drives, in that location are significant differences between Seagate's BarraCuda and its BarraCuda Pro family. First, the BarraCuda family uses 5400 RPM drives, or at to the lowest degree it seems to–Seagate practically does backflips to avert stating that in its own product documentation and omits information technology from its PDFs. BarraCuda drives besides offering a shorter warranty (2 years versus five), higher error rates, and are only rated for 55TB/twelvemonth every bit opposed to 300TB/year. While there'south cipher incorrect with offering lower-performing drives at a commensurately lower price, we're non a fan of companies hiding spindle speeds. The only reason for Seagate to obfuscate this information is to fend off customers who would presumably be grumpy if they found out they were buying a hard bulldoze for regular usage that rivaled the performance of a 1980s tape deck.