Seagate Halts Barracuda Pro HDDs: A Replacement Is Coming
Seagate Halts Barracuda Pro HDDs: A Replacement Is Coming
Seagate has discontinued its Barracuda Pro family of high-end hard drives for desktops. However, the company says it is currently preparing to replace them.
Seagate says that it will replace its Barracuda Pro family sometime in the future and will therefore continue to address the market of high-performance desktops and workstations with its HDDs. Unfortunately, it is hard to say what exactly Seagate intends to offer, and when it will be. The company could certainly offer hybrid drives that use both rotating media and NAND flash, but such HDDs have never become popular. Another option could be HDDs based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that will be cheaper to make due to lower number of platters.
High-capacity high-performance hard drives for desktops are a niche market nowadays. The absence of Western Digital’s offerings of 10TB+ capacities greatly accentuates this fact. Up until recently, Seagate offered its Barracuda Pro HDD line-up of 7200RPM class hard drives based on its latest technologies. These HDD drives featured a 7200 RPM spindle speed, conventional magnetic recording technology (perpendicular magnetic recording or PMR with two-dimensional magnetic recording for high-capacity drives), helium filing, and so on.
The end of the Barracuda Pro series creates a big hole in the offering of desktop HDD disks. Conventional 3.5 Bar Barracuda drives have a maximum capacity of 8 TB and always have SMR recording. That’s why they are not suitable for more demanding workloads where they would have to write large amounts of data at once. Also, standard Barracuda discs are always 5400 rpm, so their performance is considered too low by professionals.
Without Seagate Barracuda Pro in the company’s line-up, performance-demanding users who want 7200 RPM and CMR will have to opt for the company’s IronWolf HDD that tops at 12TB or IronWolf Pro that has a maximum capacity of 18TB. The IronWolf series is aimed primarily at NAS and feature appropriate firmware, so they may not be very optimal for desktop usage scenarios.
Seagate states that it is currently preparing new generations of HDDs, in which something like today’s Barracuda Pro should be there again. ACE Data Recovery team is looking forward to seeing new high-capacity high-performance HHDs from Seagate and will gladly help consumers who own Seagate hard drives with all their data recovery needs.