Seagate Barracuda Pro 14TB HDD review - Introduction

Seagate Barracuda Pro 14TB review
The Megalodon of storage units is unleashed.

In this article, we take the new Seagate Barracuda Pro 14TB from Seagate for a spin (oh yeah that's a pun!), 14,000 GB and that makes it the biggest single consumer unit storage device to date. It might not offer SSD performance, but it certainly isn't slow. It's the year 2018, it's big but with these massive HDD platters, will it be fast enough? Seagate submitted the Barracuda Pro as it is their most high-end series of Seagate for desktop PC usage, actually, they specifically aim it at gamers as well, lots of storage being offered at pretty fast performance. Combined with these eight PMR platters in a helium-filled sealed enclosure, Seagate also will offer you a terrific warranty period of five years.

Fourteen terabyte

The new Seagate HDDs fall under their Guardian Series 14TB units and will be released in either a 14TB IronWolf Pro or 14TB BarraCuda Pro. The IronWolf is NAS optimized, while the Barracuda is better suited to PC and Gaming builds. The new Barracuda 14TB model we are looking at today is based on eight platters each holding a whopping 1.75 TB while spinning at 7200 rpm. To inject this many platters with that capacity in a small 3.5" casing, Seagate needs to apply an airtight solution, in fact, they are using a helium-filled unit which also allows for continuous operation. The HDDs have a 256 MB of DRAM cache which can process small writes much faster than the hard disk itself. The HDD uses 6.9 watts of power while in operation, and 4.9 in IDLE. 

Seagate specifies a maximum 'throughput' and reads performance of 250 MB/s. Our tests will show how fast this storage sample really is in several scenarios. Before we begin, we still have to see the final price but early listing show roughly 569 euros for this unit, so that's 4.0 cents per gigabyte, not bad at all for a high-end drive.

A funky extra service you'll get is the following, if after purchasing (but within two years) your HDD dies, you can call on Seagate's data rescue department who will try to restore your data in the event of a crash or failure, free of charge. Well, have a peek with the help of a photo first and then head onwards into the review.