Desktop Hard Drives: Seagate Retires BarraCuda Pro HDD

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Seagate has discontinued the BarraCuda Pro series of desktop hard drives designed for high performance. The manufacturer is talking about a product changeover and is holding out the prospect of replacements, details are not yet available.

The BarraCuda Pro is to have a successor

Seagate has confirmed the discontinuation of the BarraCuda Pro series to the online magazine Tom & apos; s Hardware. However, no details are yet available about the “replacement model” promised by a company spokesman.

The BarraCuda Pro series is no longer listed on the public product pages for the Seagate BarraCuda hard drives, although some models are still available in free trade. In the 3.5-inch format, the series offered models with up to 14 TB of storage space and a rotation speed of 7,200 rpm and a maximum throughput of 250 MB/s.

Without the suffix “Pro”, Seagate continues to offer BarraCuda hard drives, but these mostly work at 5,400 rpm and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) technology and accordingly deliver less performance.

We can only speculate about what the successor to the BarraCuda Pro will look like. Switching to a newer platform with greater data density and higher transfer rates is only logical. In the series for NAS (IronWolf) and Server (Exos), Seagate has corresponding HDD designs with up to 18 TB, 7,200 rpm, faster CMR technology and more than 250 MB/s at the top.

The fact that Seagate is continuing to pursue the “High Performance Desktop HDD” sector at all is not at all taken for granted. Because the much faster SSD technology has almost displaced the classic hard drives from desktop PCs and notebooks.

Even if Seagate were to rely on the faster Mach.2 technology for the new high-end HDDs with almost doubled performance thanks to two actuators, they would not be able to handle them significantly Keep up with the faster access times of an SSD, which ensures noticeably faster application starts. In addition, SSDs work silently, are more compact and usually require less energy. SSDs are now also being used instead of HDDs in game consoles of the new generation.

Only when it comes to the price per gigabyte are HDDs still the clear leader and are therefore used in applications with high storage requirements and low requirements used in performance, such as in large cloud storage systems.