Seagate unveils 10TB Consumer Hard Drive portfolio

Seagate unveiled today a new portfolio of 10 Terabyte hard drives for the consumer market that push storage capacities to new heights.

The 10 Terabyte drives Seagate Barracuda Pro, Seagate IronWolf and Seagate SkyHawk are designed for desktop, NAS and surveillance system use.

Dubbed the first consumer 10 Terabyte drives, drives with a capacity of 10 Terabyte have been available for some time in the Enterprise sector.  Drives like the Ultrastar HE10 or Seagate's Enterprise Capacity series offer 10TB capacity for a premium price, and while aimed at the Enterprise market, could also be bought by consumers.

The 10TB Barracuda Pro hard drive is not your typical large storage low performance drive. It offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 220 MB/s, 256 Megabyte cache, and spins at 7200rpm. Seagate notes that the combination of performance and storage makes it perfect for gaming and professional use that require high performance drives.

It is rather interesting that Seagate uses a conventional system for storage and not Helium-sealed technology which many of the Enterprise solutions use at the moment.

Seagate notes that the new Barracuda Pro 10TB drive is power efficient despite it being a 7200rpm drive that uses a platter-design for storage. The drive consumes as little as 4.5 watts during idle and 6.8 watts during seek. Power consumption is nearly identical for the other two 10TB drives Seagate unveiled today.

IronWolf designed for NAS and Seahawk designed for surveillance are the two other drive families that make up the new 10TB portfolio of hard drives. If you compare specs, you will notice some differences. The Barracuda Pro drive offers slightly faster "max sustained data transfer" rates, a higher workload rate limit, but fewer load/unload cycles.

IronWolf is built with drive balance, and is the first in its class of drives to have rotational vibration (RV) sensors to mitigate vibration in multi-drive systems, RAID optimization for best performance with error recovery control, and advance power management providing power savings in NAS

SkyHawk drives use rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and can support the razor sharp vision of 64 cameras, more than any other drive on the market. Ideal for modern, hi-resolution systems running 24/7, SkyHawk drives also come with a data recovery services option for additional peace of mind

The Barracuda Pro 10TB drive features a five-year warranty period which is the same as Seagate's Enterprise drives. The lower priced Skyhawk and Ironwolf drives a two-year shorter warranty period of three-years.

The Seagate Barracuda Pro 10TB hard drive has a list price of $534.99, the IronWolf one of $469.99 and the Skyhawk a list price of $459.99. This equates to a per-Gigabyte price of $0.053, $0.046 and $0.045.

To put this into perspective: The 10TB Enterprise drives that are already available are available for $610 and more currently, and 8TB drives with 7200ropm start at around $400.

Comparable Solid State Drives are not available right now. The highest capacity offered by SSDs is 4TB currently and those devices come at a premium price of $1500 and more right now.

Specs are yet to be confirmed through independent tests.

Now You: How much storage do you have at your disposal currently?