It certainly has been a while since we took a look at Seagate and their raison d’etre: massive hard disk drive storage. In the intervening quarters Seagate has undergone a rather radical shift in focus and design philosophy for their consumer-orientated products. Where there was once a hodgepodge of models that somewhat overlapped with no real clear delineation in what a given model’s target demographic was, there is now laser like focus. In addition to this new and clearer design philosophy,
Seagate has brought back their cult classic BarraCuda brand! With such a new and exciting product line-up we felt it best to start with this classic series as it not only brings back memories (our first ‘Cuda was a SCSI 1.0 circa 1991 model) but this ‘new’ series has been tailor made for the average home consumer. To be precise we will be placing the 10TB capacity version of the Seagate BarraCuda Pro under the microscope to see what makes it tick, and if it is as good an option as it appears to be on paper.
On paper the new Seagate BarraCuda Pro does indeed appear to be a veritable powerhouse with capacity options ranging from a ‘small’ 2 TB version all the way to a massive 12TB monster. Though only the 6TB and above get the full ‘Pro’ treatment. Regardless of the capacity option you select all 6TB and above ‘Cuda Pro models share very similar technology. All are based on Helium technology and 1.43 to 1.5TB platters (1.43TB for 10TB and under, with 12TB getting the 1.5TB treatment), have extremely high – for their capacity – read/write performance specifications (220MB/s for the 10TB), offer a massive five year warranty with 24/7 usage rating, excellent drive write specifications (300TB/year), and have extra large cache buffer of 256MB.
This however is only the paper specifications and does not tell the entire story. As the Seagate BarraCuda Pro is part of the new ‘Guardian’ series this new model also comes with a little secrete sauce that transforms a large and smart controller + onboard cache combination into an entirely new beast never seen before in consumer hard disk drives. What we mean by this is Seagate has finally transferred over a lot of the SandForce Solid State Drive controller technology to their ‘standard’ hard disk drive lineup. The end result is a series that promises to extremely intelligent in learning your habits and boost performance higher than what has ever been seen outside of SSHD models.
With the help of Seagate we can now show you exactly what MTC is, why you should care about it, and what it can do for you and your system. Without giving anything way the end results actually do live up the hype… and then some. We hope you enjoy the review and come to see this new series as we have. We have a sneaking suspicion though that you will indeed be impressed with what it has to offer.
