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BarraCuda-Feature

Solid land drives (SSDs) may take hold of about of the headlines these days, but demand for cloud-enabled products and system storage continues to rise, and hard drives are still an order of magnitude cheaper than fifty-fifty the cheapest SSDs. Seagate is pushing the boundaries on magnetic spinning media with a new suite of 10TB hard drives — and it's relaunching a familiar brand name in the consumer infinite while introducing new brands for its NAS and remote surveillance products. Collectively, these 10TB drives are known as the Guardian Series.

Barracuda'south back in town

For over a decade, Seagate's loftier-end consumer drives were branded as Barracuda's. In 2013 the visitor unofficially retired the proper noun, choosing instead to refer to its desktop drives equally "Desktop HDD." While the company wins points for simplicity, "Desktop HDD" isn't the kind of branding that gets anyone excited about annihilation. Seagate is relaunching the Barracuda — or BarraCuda if you adopt Seagate's new spelling — brand name effectually its 10TB consumer drives.

BarraCuda drives will be bachelor in two flavors — BarraCuda and BarraCuda Pro. The BarraCuda base drives are available in a diversity of capacities and both the ii.5-inch and 3.5-inch form factors, while BarraCuda Pro drives are three.5-inch products bachelor in upwardly to 10TB. Seagate is also rebranding its solid state hybrid difficult drives (SSHD) as FireCuda.

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The deviation between the BarraCuda and BarraCuda Pro is their workload charge per unit limits (yearly), warranty menstruation, and sustained transfer rates. The BarraCuda drives can transfer upward to 210MB/s, have a 55TB/yr workload limit, and a ii-twelvemonth warranty. BarraCuda Pro drives, in dissimilarity, offer a 220MB/s sustained transfer rate, 300TB/twelvemonth write limit (in 24×7 functioning) and five-yr warranty.

Exist advised that "Sustained transfer rate" is a suspect phrase at best. A typical 7200 RPM HDD's sustained transfer rate volition depend on where data is stored on the bulldoze. Data stored at the outer edge will transfer more than rapidly than the innermost tracks, which is why short-stroking difficult drives to isolate and only use the outer tracks used to be a affair.

Seagate'southward literature makes reference to intelligent cache management software every bit improving overall BarraCuda performance, merely its conventional BarraCuda / BarraCuda Pro drives don't include whatever NAND flash and their DRAM caches (at present up to 256MB on the 10TB drives) have been bumped up to keep pace with ascension storage capacities.

(Fun fact: The first big-cache hard drives was the Western Digital WD800JB. Information technology was an 80GB HDD with an 8MB enshroud and noticeably improve performance than its 2MB-equipped analogue. Hard drive manufacturers have apparently adult more efficient enshroud mechanisms; the BarraCuda Pro is 125x the WD800JB'due south capacity merely has just 32x the enshroud RAM).

These new 10TB drives don't appear to employ helium, but they aren't based on Shingled Magnetic Recording, either. These drives use conventional perpendicular recording, which means they won't have a operation hit when writing data.

Seagate is also launching new make names and product families for its other divisions. Surveillance drives for remote cameras are now sold under the Skyhawk make, while its 10TB network attached storage (NAS) drives volition exist branded as Ironwolf. The Ironwolf drives contain additional vibration dampening technology, including remote vibration sensors, dual-airplane balancing, and born mistake recovery command.

Dampening vibration is a serious consideration for NAS (Network attached storage) devices or servers. Equally the video higher up shows, yelling into a server can impale difficult bulldoze performance.

Massive capacity, massive layoffs

These new product launches are a significant achievement — 10TB consumer drives are a pregnant step above what's already on the market and Seagate is confident enough in its production portfolio to gyre them out beyond all of its products at the aforementioned time. These new launches come equally the visitor is prepping for significant rounds of layoffs and a reduction in its overall drive manufacturing.

Seagate has announced 2 rounds of layoffs in the last half dozen weeks and plans to burn down roughly 8,100 people over the next 12 months, or 14% of its current global workforce. The company as well plans to build fewer hard drives per quarter, from electric current targets of 55-60 million downwards to 35-twoscore million drives.

HDD manufacturers accept been hit hard by two trends in the PC market. Like the rest of the PC industry, they face shrinking unit shipments as consumer and business PC sales drop and long-hoped for refresh cycles fail to materialize. They're also under pressure from SSDs. While most PCs still favor difficult drives over solid state storage, SSDs have carved out a salubrious chunk of business organization that used to belong to the hard drive manufacturers. Conventional spinning drives are going nowhere someday soon, only stiff competition from solid state storage is going to make life as a magnetic medium manufacturer increasingly difficult.