Seagate Unleashes 14TB Storage Assault With SkyHawk, Exos X14, BarraCuda Pro, Iron Wolf Drives
Seagate is flexing its mechanical hard drive line like its 1999, only with much larger capacities for the modern era. Sure, many of us have moved on to solid state drives, at least for our primary storage. But there is still a market for good old fashioned HDDs. Several markets, actually, and Seagate hopes to serve them all with several new 14 terabyte models.
The storage maker updated its entire range of HDDs with new 14TB models, including its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro for network attached storage (NAS) appliances, BarraCuda Pro for consumer desktops, SkyHawk for surveillance applications, and Exos X14 for hyperscale data centers. In other words, there's a 14TB model for everyone.
"Data protection, management and archiving are no longer strictly the realm of IT departments, but are now essential responsibilities for business owners, creative professionals, online gamers and PC users alike," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of devices at Seagate. "We understand the critical nature of data in unlocking opportunities to efficiency. From the largest data center to the personal user, our goal is to ensure every customer can access, store and transfer data quickly and reliably, whenever they need it and wherever they are."
If nothing else, Seagate deserves props for having the coolest model names. It reminds us of that opening scene in Step Brothers when Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) tells Brennan Huff (Will Ferrel), "You have to call me Dragon," to which Brennan replies, "You have to call me Nighthawk."
There are more to these drives than awesome names, of course. The 14TB BarraCuda Pro, for example, is a 3.5-inch consumer drive with a beefy 256MB of cache and 7,200 RPM spindle speed. This is one of those newfangled helium-filled HDDs, with eight PRM platters stuffed inside. According to Samsung, it boasts a max sustained transfer rate of 250MB/s.
Solid state drives are much faster, of course, especially NVMe variants that shuttle data through the PCI Express bus. When it comes to bulk storage, though, it's about the price per gigabyte. In this case, here's how the pricing breaks down:
- Seagate IronWolf 14TB: $529.99
- Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB: $599.99
- Seagate BarraCuda Pro 14TB: $579.99
- Seagate SkyHawk 14TB: $509.99
- Seageate Exos X14 14TB: $614.99
While not exactly cheap, the price per gigabyte is actually low, ranging from 3.6 to 4.4 cents (4.1 cents per gigabyte for the BarraCuda Pro).
One thing to keep in mind when plopping so much data onto a single drive is to make sure you back up your critical files. That's important regardless of drive size, but is an even bigger priority when dealing with larger capacity drives—you don't want to permanently lost 14TB of data in one fell swoop.
