Seagate wants to stuff 12TB of storage into your desktop and NAS boxes

If it is a single high-capacity hard drive you're after, you have options. Seagate just expanded its IronWolf and IronWolf Pro HDD families for NAS applications and BarraCuda Pro for desktops to 12TB. The capacious hard drives are response into the growing amount of data that is out there—according to a study by Seagate and IDC, data creation will swell to 163 zettabytes (ZB) by 2025. 

"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."

The BarraCuda Pro is now available in six different capacities, including 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB, 10TB, and 12TB. Each one has a 7,200 RPM spindle speed and 256MB of cache. The 12TB model offers a maximum sustained transfer rate of 260MB/s.

Seagate's IronWolf now comes in eight different capacities ranging from 1TB to 12TB, while the IronWolf Pro family sports six models ranging from 2TB to 12TB. Both lines are intended for NAS boxes—the IronWolf targets home users, and IronWolf Pro takes aim at commercial and enterprise NAS solutions.

Reliability is always an important factor, though even more so when dealing with high-capacity HDDs such as the new 12TB models today. To that end, the IronWolf Pro and BarraCuda Pro are both backed by 5-year warranties, while the IronWolf is curiously only guaranteed for 3 years.

Seagate as a brand is sometimes the subject of heavy criticism in this arena. Much of it is anecdotal, though looking at a hard drive reliability report earlier this year by cloud backup provider Backblaze, one of Seagate's 4TB models (ST400DX000) high a relatively high annualized failure rate, albeit with a small sample size. Other models by Seagate fared much better.

Looking ahead, if Seagate sticks to its previously announced time frame, it will have 14TB and 16TB models within around the next 10 months, followed by a 20TB HDD in 2020.

There is still a big market for HDDs even as faster solid state drives have become commonplace. And for Seagate, HDDs are still proving lucrative—the company generated $2.4 billion during its fiscal fourth quarter that ended June 30, 2017, of which more than $2.2 billion came from HDD sales.

Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).

Latest in HDDs
A photo of a robotically disassembled hard disk drive
Microsoft's recyclobot uses machine learning and computer vision to open and recycle 90% of hard drive components
Hard Drive
Millions of perfectly fine HDDs are shredded each year because of 'zero risk' security policies. Spoiler alert: There's still a risk of stolen data from just a 3mm scrap
IBM100 RAMDAC
Hard drives predicted to be history after 2028
Seagate Exos 2X14 Mach.2 hard drive
Seagate agrees to pay US gov $300m for selling Huawei some hard drives
matze79's HDD Clicker.
Bring that retro hard drive clicking sound back into your life with this little device
Spider-Verse Seagates
Seagate's Into the Spider-Verse styled portable HDDs are stunning
Latest in News
Roblox CEO David Baszucki.
'Don't let your kids be on Roblox', Roblox CEO tells parents, before comparing himself to Walt Disney and declaring the platform 'the future of communication'
Titus in Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 reveal promo image
Praise be to the Omnissiah! Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 3 is officially in development
Jensen Huang, co-founder and chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., speaks while holding the company's new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards and a Thor Blackwell robotics processor during the 2025 CES event in Las Vegas, Nevada, US, on Monday, Jan. 6, 2025. Huang announced a raft of new chips, software and services, aiming to stay at the forefront of artificial intelligence computing. Photographer: Bridget Bennett/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Group allegedly trying to smuggle Nvidia Blackwell chips stare down bail set at over $1 million
New art of Harry and Kim from Disco Elysium, with Harry holding a lit molotov cocktail.
Despite Disco Elysium Mobile aiming to 'captivate the TikTok user,' it looks surprisingly decent—but it's still insulting to Disco's ousted creators
Flag of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia buys Pokémon GO maker for $3.5 billion with a 'B'
A cold-looking gameplay shot of Fate: Reawakened
Fate: Reawakened gives the nostalgic 20-year-old action RPG series a new lease on life