Authored by bharthi amlani
With its new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of storage capacity for PCs, NAS (network attached storage) and surveillance systems, 
Seagate has made a revolutionary move in IT storage sector. These hard capacity drives of Guardian Series represent a clear 2TB increase in the terms of storage capacity in the consumer as well as small business category. The brand name “BarraCuda” is actually resurrected version of its previous “Desktop Hard Drive” which was started a few years ago.
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 at 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.
The company has further announced BarraCuda Pro, a new drive for PC enthusiasts, with the capacity 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. So, the warranty is more than double than the typical typical two-year BarraCuda warranty.
Chris Deardorff, a senior Seagate marketing strategist says, “BarraCuda Pro offers the highest PC Compute spin speed at 7200 RPM for 3.5-in. HDD drives on the market.”
The drive is enriched with Seagate’s Self-Encryption Drive technology, that protects data with password and also allow the user to crypto-erase it by changing the encryption key with an assurance of inaccessibility by anyone else. The drive can sustain up to 55TB of data per year. The 10TB BarraCuda Pro will retail for $535.
As a part of BarraCuda lineup, the company has announced FireCuda, another hard drive specifically aimed at gamers. They come in 2.5-in. and 3.5-in and in 1TB and 2TB capacities. The FireCuda will retail for $85 for a 1TB drive, $110 for the 2TB model.
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.
The improvement efforts by Seagate are not limited till it. The company has further refreshed its NAS drive lineup with the IronWolf brand. It is aimed at NAS devices with 16 drive bays and come with up to 10TB capacity and Seagate’s AgileArray software on it. AgileArray technology is used for various functions such as error recovery controls, power mangement and vibration tolerance reliability.
According to Jennifer Bradfield, senior director of product marketing Seagate says “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”. As a big power savvier, 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.
