Seagate's standard BarraCuda desktop hard drive range ends at 4TB, the BarraCuda Pro range however, goes way past this to the new flagship of the lineup, the leviathan 12TB drive. Although there are even bigger drives to be had in the enterprise segment, in the desktop space, the 12TB BarraCuda Pro is the largest hard drive available at the time of writing.
To get to its mammoth capacity the drive uses helium technology to allow eight 1.5 TB platters (discs) along with 16 reading/writing heads to be using in a standard, albeit 26.11mm thick enclosure.
Using helium (which is 1/7th the density of air) allows drive manufacturers to use thinner platters and be able to pack more of them into a drive chassis. This because using helium inside the drive reduces the drag force acting on the spinning disks as well as reducing flow forces acting around both disks and heads.
Seagate quote a sustained transfer rate for the 12TB BarraCuda Pro at 250MB/s, something we were able to confirm with the ATTO benchmark, the reviewed disk producing figures of 255MB/s for reads and 252MB/s for writes.
Official power ratings for the drive are active 7.8W, average idling 4.83W and 0.84W and 0.8W for Standby and Sleep modes respectively.
We found the 12TB BarraCuda Pro available to pre-order on Overclockers UK for £439.99 HERE
Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.
Pros.
- Huge capacity.
- 5-year warranty.
Cons.
- Expensive
Kitguru says: The demand for cheap storage shows no sign of slowing down and Seagate's new 12TB BarraCuda Pro may not be that cheap at first glance for a standard hard drive but it is offering a huge amount of capacity in a single drive.
250 MBPS- that’s nearly half the speed of a good SATA 3 SSD. This is just incredible!
What about noise please? Since I’m trying to decide between Seagate and HGST, noise, or the lack of it, is quite important to me..
seagate. ugh. had 2 of them die on the same day. No SMART warnings or nothing. I couldn’t trust that much data to them. Hope they don’t do the 1 year warranty on it like their other drives.
It says early on there’s a 5 year warranty.
I can honestly tell you that I just gave up regarding Noise … I first bought a 10TB IronWolf drive and it was noisy as hell and vibrating badly so I returned it. Then I bought a 8TB Western Digital Red (low RPM model) and that one was even worse so again, I returned it. That’s when I just gave up and ordered a 8TB Sky Hawk (had nice discount) and of course it makes the same shitty noises as the IronWolf one. Later I bought a 4TB HGST Nas drive and guess what, it vibrates as badly as the WD Red one … I have no ideea what’s happening and why reviews don’t mention noise at all … my old(4-5+years old) Seagate 3TB and Toshiba 4TB drives make little to no noise and so do the 2TB Barracuda Drives – they are by far the most silent.
I have massively dissapointed in these large capacity HDD’s … maybe its just the NAS type HDD’s that are the issue … maybe the green Barracuda ones will be fairly silent … I don’t know, I just can’t find any info anywhere sadly T_T”