Last issue we reviewed Seagate’s new IronWolf NAS hard drive, and now we have its new desktop product in the Labs. The Barracuda Pro comes in 6TB, 8TB and 10TB flavours, and with a 7,200RPM rotational speed it’s quick – in fact Seagate is claiming it’s the fastest range of hard drives for that capacity range.
But that’s not, as they say: all. Each drive in Seagate’s Barracuda Pro range sports a very healthy 256MB of cache – for comparison the best WD has to offer is 128MB on its 4TB – 6TB Black range. And Seagate has the edge in capacity too, with WD topping out at 6TB for its Blue range of desktop drives. Toshiba can’t compete, either. It’s large capacity desktop drives also spin at 7,200RPM, but have half the cache of the new Seagate.
So Seagate is owning the competition in capacity, rotational speed and cache – and not by small margins, either. The cache and spinner speed translate into very quick benchtest numbers. Seagate’s own claims are a maximum sustained transfer rate of 220MB/s, but our testing returned numbers that bested even those impressive speeds. We recorded read speeds of 239MB/s and write speeds of 224MB/s. That’s mighty impressive performance for a hard drive – let alone one that manages an equally impressive 10TB capacity.
To top it all off, Seagate is offering a five-year warranty as standard. WD’s warranty period for desktop Blue drives is two years, as is Toshiba’s. Pricing is reasonable, although at the time of going to press we haven’t been told what the 6TB and 8TB drives will cost.
Here’s a hard drive with a mammoth 10TB capacity, performance that’s close to half that of most SATA SSDS – which is quite the compliment – and a five-year warranty to boot. We’ve been hearing good things, too, from our friends in retail about Seagate’s very much improved reliability in recent months. At this point in time this is the hard drive to have if you want a big and fast one.
Buy Now Seagate IronWolf 10TB Internal NAS Hard Drive
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