How Does Multi-Tier Caching Let You Combine High Capacity, Great System Performance, and Lower Cost?

See how BarraCuda’s use of Seagate Multi-Tier Caching technology enables customers to experience excellent overall system performance at lower cost.

System builders know, our BarraCuda drive family has quickly established itself as an industry leader by providing the highest capacities for both desktops and mobile computers. With drives available up to 14TB, now your customers can enjoy hard drive upgrades at any price point. The high-performance BarraCuda Pro marries industry-leading storage capacity with 7200-RPM spin speeds to deliver blazing performance and load times when gaming or handling heavy workloads. And BarraCuda Pro also comes equipped with a best-in-class 5 year warranty!

One of the key features that enables BarraCuda drives to combine impressive speed with superior value is Multi-Tier Caching™ (MTC) technology, Seagate’s trademarked caching scheme which utilizes multiple memory schemes and firmware to optimize data flow to enhance both read and write performance.

Feature Spotlight: Multi-Tier Caching Technology

Today, various forms of storage are deployed in widely varied applications beyond traditional PCs and servers. Their workloads and capacity requirements can vary greatly.

While the fastest performance can be obtained with DRAM cache, the data in the DRAM is not persistent through power cycles and DRAM is very expensive compared to other media. NAND flash data survives through power cycles, though customers understand choosing NAND brings a higher cost-per-gigabyte compared to a magnetic storage medium.

Multi-Tier Caching Lets You Combine High Capacity, Great System Performance, and Lower Cost

Magnetic storage media caching offers good performance at a very low cost, but this method of caching on the magnetic media itself requires some reduction in the overall available disk drive capacity for main storage on the perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) disk media.

Ultimately, all of these types of media can be used in combination — to provide the most useful levels of performance and capacity, at varying appropriate price points.

And that’s the value of Multi-Tier Caching technology. By carefully tuning firmware with all the most appropriate cache types and sizes, Seagate enables your customers to experience excellent overall system performance at lower cost. Furthermore, because the data flow is managed by the disk drive controller, the system’s operating system and applications work seamlessly.