If early press reviews are an indication, Seagate may have a winning hand with its new 10TB highly engineered, purpose-built hard drives.
In July, Seagate launched the Guardian Series™, and shipped several review units to key technology publications and blogs. The new lineup includes: Barracuda and Barracuda Pro desktop compute drives, along with the FireCuda solid-state hybrid drive for gamers, creative professionals, and tech enthusiasts; IronWolf for network-attached storage applications; and SkyHawk for video surveillance systems.
The drives set new industry benchmarks across multiple storage fronts. The BarraCuda Pro, for example, leapfrogs the leading competitor’s 3.5-inch computing drives in capacity and performance, while the IronWolf is the first of its kind to have built-in rotational-vibration sensors to mitigate against vibration in multi-drive NAS systems. And SkyHawk soars above its competition with an industry-best workload rating of 180TB per year—three times what the competitor’s surveillance drive offers.
To date, Seagate’s Guardian Series launch has earned 470 news articles, 47 reviews and 17 awards.
Here’s a sampling of what the tech press has to say about the Guardian Series:
PC World: “The BarraCuda Pro is vast and stupendously fast, and is also miserly on the power consumption. It not only delivers a stunning 10TB of storage, it laid down some rather astounding transfer rates. All in all, it’s the best 3.5-inch internal hard drive we’ve ever tested by a long shot.”
CNET: “If you’re looking to greatly increase the storage capacity of your desktop computer, NAS server or surveillance recorder, Seagate’s got you covered.”
Legit Reviews: “Overall performance of the (BarraCuda Pro) drive was impressive, as we were able to hit speeds of 246MB/s read and 236MB/s write. The BarraCuda Pro easily gets our recommended award.”
PC Perspective: “Seagate’s new BarraCuda Pro offers impressive performance for their first foray into helium-filled 3.5-inch drives. Definitely worthy of the BarraCuda name!”
TweakTown: “The IronWolf brings a solid jump in capacity over previous 8TB NAS solutions. Seagate is offering a solid amount of technology in this solution with AgileArray, and its 180TB per year rating is one of the highest on the market. A high level of build quality is present, and I found solid consistency and no drive failures—and this was after a lot of end-to-end testing.”
Engadget: “It’s no longer far-fetched to buy a 10TB hard drive if you’re running a server, but what if you need gobs of space for your games and 4K videos at home? Seagate has your back covered.”
Tech Radar: “Seagate is pushing the limits of rotating storage yet again, by releasing the world’s largest consumer hard drive at a whopping 10TB of storage. Although most of us may not need 10TB of storage, it’s nice to have a drive with more than enough space to house all the 40 megapixel photos, 4K videos and 60GB games you’ll undoubtedly accumulate in the future.”
PC & Tech Authority: “We benched the 10TB IronWolf at a very healthy 234MB/s read and 212MB/s write. This is truly exceptional performance for a hard drive, let alone one that’s optimized for low-power consumption and long-term reliability.”
Hardware Heaven: “Read/write speeds (for the IronWolf) are impressive for a mechanical storage device. A drive which opens up huge storage potential for users of multi-bay NAS devices.”