Seagate Launches 12TB IronWolf NAS And 12TB Barracuda Pro Hard Drives
Seagate has rolled out a pair of new HDDs with the first of them being a 12TB 3.5-inch unit in the IronWolf line aimed specifically at NAS environments. That drive has features specifically to make it perform inside a network attached storage (NAS) device including AgileArray and dual-plane balancing along with RAID optimizations built right in. Seagate also promises that the IronWolf drive has advanced power management integrated.
IronWolf drives are offered in a range of capacities with the largest being the new 12TB drive. The drive was built to support a work rate of 180TB per year (Pro version is rated for 300TB per year) allowing multiple users to upload and download data to the NAS. The drives are designed for always on, always accessible performance.
Seagate rates the IronWolf drives for 1 million hours MTBF and the drive comes with a 3-year limited warranty. Seagate will be rolling out an IronWolf 12TB drive with IronWolf Health Management giving access to health information about the drive through popular NAS systems in CYQ417. The AgileArray feature mentioned before is an entire suite of tech including error recovery control, RAID optimization firmware, AccuTrack vibration tolerance, dual-plane balancing, RV sensors, Streaming Support, and NAS Power management for lower power consumption. The 12TB IronWolf Standard drive is $390 with the 12TB IronWolf Pro priced at $430.
The other drive is in the BarraCuda Pro series promising "lightning-fast performance" and 12TB storage capacity. The drive spins at 7,200 rpm and has a large onboard cache for faster access to frequently used applications and files. That big cache is 256MB. The drive slurps down 7.8W of power making it one of the lowest power consumption 3.5-inch drives available.
BarraCuda Pro has a 6Gb/s interface and supports up to 250MB/s maximum sustained transfer rate. Seagate gives the drive a 5-year warranty and two years of data recovery included via Seagate Rescue if the drive fails early. The 12TB BarraCuda Pro drive sells for $430. Both of these new drives use Helium Technology and have eight platters inside. Western Digital also rolled out a helium-filled hard drive this week with even more storage space (14TB to be exact) aimed at enterprise use called the HGST Ultrastar Hs14.
"Our storage hungry customers and partners continue to ask for our latest and greatest technology along with increased capacity and performance in our purpose built products," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of Business Marketing at Seagate Technology. "With the 12TB Pro products, Seagate buyers are overcoming capacity constraints in their systems and can access vast amounts of digital data anytime, from anywhere."
