Seagate unveils hard drives with up to 10TB capacity

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 "Desktop 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.

:story: Computerworld