Now here’s an external hard drive that goes way beyond the needs of storing Word files and cat pictures.. The new Seagate BarraCuda Pro is an absolute monster of an external hard drive which clearly has in mind heavy duty 4K video workflow professionals and those who need to store immense archives of large format RAW images. Its storage capacity is a gargantuan 12TB and the new hard drive from this company also comes with assorted other specs for exactly the kind of heavy digital storage needs a videographer working with ultra HD video might just need.
Seagate for its part is also pushing the new BarraCuda Pro at the potential market for users who are working in the now increasingly popular AR and VR media environment, claiming (correctly we think) that a device like the 12TB BarraCuda is perfectly ideal for these applications as well.
The massively dense new hard drive is sized similarly to any normal 1 or 2TB drive you might find but concealed under its hood is a series of powerful specs for all the data it’s supposed to carry. These include a 7,200 rpm spin speed and a 256MB cache size for high speed loading of files.
The new hard drive is also being accompanied onto the market by Seagate’s very similar new IronWolf hard drives, which also offer 12TB storage but also pair it with multi-user access via file sharing and remote access options for team-based projects. These new drives form a part of the company’s “Guardian” series of high capacity storage options for today’s world of growing digital image resolutions, dramatically expanding video resolution sizes and new, high density media applications for virtual reality, HDR movie workflows and so forth. They’re also designed to be extremely reliable. Seagate claims failure-free working capacities of 2 million+ hours for both drives and the IronWolf in particular comes with a basic 5 year warranty.
Average users will probably have little interest in so much storage space on a single hard drive –though it’s often surprising how many ordinary consumer users just love to have pro-level tools on hand even for basic PC needs—and if you’re just doing some regular photo editing or need to keep your collection of pirated music and movies safe somewhere, both the Seagate BarraCuda Pro and IronWolf are probably absolute overkill. This applies to the budget too since these drives are not at all cheap, with the BarraCuda Pro 12TB model set to cost roughly $530. The IronWolf is set to be priced even higher than this due to its multi-user access features.