‘Seagate’s’ 10TB Hard Drive Coming Soon – World’s Largest Commercial Unit

When it comes to hard drives, “Seagate” is in a league of its own. It recently announced a hard drive lineup that has a 10TB capacity, making it the largest storage device series in the world for consumer use.

The hard drive is part of a new lineup of units by “Seagate” that have 10TB capacities aimed at desktops and other sectors where high-capacity storage devices are needed such as surveillance and network-attached storage (NAS), according to Computer World. The company dubbed the lineup the “Guardian Series,” and they have a 2TB advantage over the next, most powerful hard drives “Seagate” offers.

In the “Guardian Series,” the hard drives are the “BarraCuda Pro,” the “IronWolf” and the “SkyHawk.” The “BarraCuda Pro” is meant for desktops, the “IronWold” is meant for NAS, and the “SkyHawk” will be paired with surveillance systems.

With 10TB of capacity, this makes the “BarraCuda Pro” the most powerful commercial hard drive in the world, according to PC World. Storage capacity is not the only factor that “Seagate” considered, as the hard drive has 256MB of cache, and spins at a whopping 7,200rpm. Typically, hard drives with large capacities go for 5,400rpm, which makes their performance a little on the weak side despite the advantage in storage space.

Now, the obvious point of consideration here is the matter of solid state drives (SSD), which are considerably faster than traditional HDDs. At read speeds of 220MBps, the “BarraCuda Pro” is one of the faster units of its kind around. However, SSDs can deliver 1.5GBps of read speeds, which dwarfs what the “Seagate” product can offer.

The matter of power consumption is also an issue since SSDs are known to be more efficient. On that note, “Seagate” points out that the “BarraCuda Pro” is one of the most efficient units in the market. At peak performance, it only goes for 6.8 watts. During idle, it goes for 4.5 watts.