Seagate announces new 14TB hard drive ranges

Seagate has announced the launch of a new portfolio of 14TB-capacity mechanical hard drives, aimed at both enterprise, network attached storage (NAS), and surveillance usage.

With the battle against the speed of solid-state storage well and truly lost, mechanical spinning-rust hard drive vendors are concentrating on capacity - and Seagate's new range of 14TB 3.5" drives is certainly capacious. Announced by the company this week, the range refresh spans the entire market: BarraCuda Pro drives for the high-end desktop user, IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives for network attached storage (NAS) users, Exos X14 for data centres, and SkyHawk for surveillance use.

'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,' says Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of devices at Seagate, of the company's new launches. '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.'

Concentrating on the devices more suited to mainstream users, the BarraCuda Pro 14TB boasts a 7,200 revolutions per minute (RPM) spindle speed with 256MB of cache and a claimed 250MB/s data transfer rate supported by Seagate's proprietary Multi-Tier Caching Technology (MTC) system. The IronWolf drives, meanwhile, come with the promise of a 300TB written per year (300TBW/y) workload rating, 'AgileArray' firmware for improved performance and error reporting in RAID arrays, and a two-year data recovery service guarantee alongside the five-year warranty on the IronWolf Pro. The non-Pro IronWolf, meanwhile, drops the data recovery guarantee and lowers the warranty to three years.

UK pricing for the consumer-oriented drives has been set at £507.99 for the BarraCuda Pro 14TB, £479.99 for the IronWolf 14TB, and £529.99 for the IronWolf Pro, with availability scheduled for September 17th.