Seagate launches new lineup of 10TB hard drives

Seagate yesterday launched a new lineup of 10TB hard drives, collectively called the Guardian Series, designed for not only businesses and large-scale surveillance systems, but also personal desktops.

With the launch, Seagate had brought back its popular Barracuda brand, which disappeared in 2013, with some new 2.5- and 3.5-inch offerings.

The top of the drawer BarraCuda Pro is available 6TB, 8TB, and 10TB capacity, all with a standard 7,200 RPM spindle speed. However, the series does not come cheap. According to Engadget, the 10TB desktop drive would cost  $535, and the priced includes a five-year limited warranty.

Also yesterday, Seagate introduced IronWolf for NAS applications and Seagate SkyHawk for the surveillance market to add to its 10TB portfolio.

BarraCuda Pro and IronWolf drives are now available and Seagate had promised more info about SkyHawk availability soon.

Seagate's senior vice president of Client and Consumer Storage, Matt Rutledge, said in a statement that the new drives were all about meeting the ever-growing data and video storage challenges consumers and organisations faced today.

"Whether it's dominating in the latest game, producing compelling multimedia content, mining data to help create new apps and business services, helping to protect people and places around the world against new threats, and more, the Seagate Guardian Series is designed to preserve your most critical data and move it where it's needed fast so you can make the most of it," Rutledge said.

BarraCuda and BarraCuda Pro are different in their workload rate limits (yearly), warranty period, and sustained transfer rates. The BarraCuda drives are capable of transferring up to 210MB/s, have a 55TB/year workload limit, and a two-year warranty. BarraCuda Pro drives, by way of contrast offer 220MB/s sustained transfer rate, 300TB/year write limit (in 24×7 operation) and five-year warranty.

However, it may be noted the  ''Sustained transfer rate'' was a suspect phrase at best. A typical 7200 RPM HDD's sustained transfer rate would depend on where the data was stored on the drive. Data stored at the outer edge would transfer faster than the innermost tracks.