Seagate has just announced a 10TB family of high capacity hard drives

Just when you thought you had more than enough storage for all your data needs, Seagate has launched a new family of 10TB hard drives. That's 10,000GBs of capacity in a single mechanical drive. Throw a few of these into your PC and you've just created a huge storage platform. The company has announced the 10TB BarraCuda, IronWolf, and SkyHawk, each for different applications.

The BarraCuda is for those budget-concious PC builders who would like to take full advantage of the increased space for storage. There's also a 5-year warranty thrown in for desktop owners to add that little extra peace of mind. The IronWolf is Seagate's solution for anyone who wishes to construct a NAS (Network Attached Storage) solution with its 180TB per year user workload rate, advanced power savings and error recovery control.

Finally, we have the SkyHawk, which is specifically designed for applications involving network video recording. This drive utilizes rotational vibration sensors in aid to minimize read and write errors and can support up to 64 cameras. For more details, be sure to check out the press release and official Seagate website.

Press Release

CUPERTINO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seagate Technology plc (NASDAQ:STX), a world leader in storage solutions, today unveiled a new portfolio of 10TB high capacity drives dubbed the Guardian Series™. Purpose-built to help customers better manage and move the huge amounts of digital data they consume and create, the 10TB Seagate® BarraCuda® Pro desktop drive, Seagate IronWolf™ for NAS applications and Seagate SkyHawk™ for surveillance introduce new brand names and imagery and represent the most complete 10TB portfolio in the industry. The Guardian Series features industry leading technology that raises the bar on features, speed and capacity for use across a wide range of markets, including personal, creative and design computing, online gaming, small- and medium-sized businesses and large-scale surveillance systems.

"The Barracuda family has a rich history of delivering reliable drives at an affordable price point for our customers, who are struggling to keep up with the vast amounts of data they're creating and consuming"

"Consumers and organizations today face a similar challenge -- what to do about the massive deluge of data and video they confront every day," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of Client and Consumer Storage at Seagate. "Whether it's dominating in the latest game, producing compelling multimedia content, mining data to help create new apps and business services, helping to protect people and places around the world against new threats, and more, the Seagate Guardian Series is designed to preserve your most critical data and move it where it's needed fast so you can make the most of it. By incorporating powerful new features and capabilities, our 10TB products also make it easier for everyone to create, consume and use data."

Innovative capabilities in the new 10TB drives include multi-tier caching technology (MTC Technology™), an intelligent caching architecture for maximized performance; AgileArray™, designed to optimize drive performance through error recovery control, dual-plane balancing, and power management; and ImagePerfect™ for surveillance, supporting more high resolution cameras than any other industry drive.

Seagate's 10TB product branding represents the next phase of the company's new corporate brand unveiled at CES in 2015, in which Seagate introduced its "Living Logo" that visually captured the idea that data is most valuable as part of our daily lives at home and at work. The new Guardian Series product brands link this living data concept more directly to Seagate's foundational technologies in a way that is memorable and easier for customers to understand.

BarraCuda Pro 10TB Desktop Drive

As data becomes the life blood of all online interaction and workforce productivity, Seagate has brought back its hugely popular BarraCuda brand to respond to demands for high capacity storage at an affordable price point. BarraCuda Pro combines 10TB at 7200 RPM for outstanding performance, and includes power-saving features to help keep drive operating costs low, as well as a 5-year limited warranty for peace of mind.

With its enduring legacy of PC Compute drives, BarraCuda responds to market demands for high performance hard drives that don't sacrifice capacity or affordability. The 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch fierce BarraCuda drives offer a versatile and dependable line of hard drives for nearly every application and budget. Lightweight and robust, the 2.5 inch BarraCuda drive delivers market-leading cost/TB options in a thin 7mm form factor with up to 2TB of capacity.

Furthermore, the FireCuda™ SSHD combines flash with the latest hard drive technology for both 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch offerings. The FireCuda drives ignite both fantastic capacity (up to 2TB) and performance solutions (up to 5 times faster than its HDD counterpart) for gaming and creative applications.

"The Barracuda family has a rich history of delivering reliable drives at an affordable price point for our customers, who are struggling to keep up with the vast amounts of data they're creating and consuming," said Merle McIntosh, SVP Sales and Marketing, Newegg. "Seagate is pushing the boundaries on capacity and a cost-effective 10TB option is a product our customers will appreciate."

IronWolf 10TB for NAS

Tough, ready, and scalable, IronWolf combines the legacy of big iron with tough, pack-leading performance for NAS applications and a wide range of capabilities designed to meet the most challenging always-on environments. NAS-optimized with AgileArray, IronWolf is built with drive balance, and is the first in its class of drives to have rotational vibration (RV) sensors to mitigate vibration in multi-drive systems, RAID optimization for best performance with error recovery control, and advance power management providing power savings in NAS. The result is power when and where it's needed most. IronWolf raises the bar even further with multi-user technology that provides a 180TB/year user workload rate.

"It is critical for businesses with demanding data growth to select the right drive that is optimized for enterprise NAS usage and high capacity data storage," said Jones Tsai, vice president, Hardware Division at Synology Inc. "Seagate IronWolf works seamlessly with our latest technology developments. With the perfect balance of durability and agility, IronWolf meets the requirements to support running multiple enterprise-level applications developed by Synology on NAS."

"NAS hardware and software has greatly evolved to cover potentially limitless applications for home and business users. This evolution now calls for a new breed of hard drive that can provide the capacity, performance and flexibility for next-generation QNAP NAS," said Meiji Chang, GM of QNAP. "IronWolf from Seagate represents a great leap forward for NAS hard drives, and we are amazed at its potential to take QNAP NAS to the next level."

SkyHawk 10TB for Surveillance

An industry first, Seagate celebrates its 10th year of shipping surveillance drives with its latest 10TB SkyHawk offering for surveillance systems relying on large storage solutions for network video recording (NVR). SkyHawk drives use rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and can support the razor sharp vision of 64 cameras, more than any other drive on the market. Ideal for modern, hi-resolution systems running 24/7, SkyHawk drives also come with a data recovery services option for additional peace of mind.

"Seagate pioneered surveillance purpose-built drives more than 10 years ago with Hikvision's R&D team, and today they continue to lead and partner closely with us to develop surveillance storage solutions of the future," said R&D director Mr. Chenghua Sun at Hikvision. "With the advances in camera technology from 4k to thermal to panoramic recording, Hikvision believes in Seagate's technology to optimize storage for highest quality recordings and to ensure customer data is safe and secure."

"Seagate is a powerful storage brand in the surveillance market," said James Wang, vice president of Dahua Overseas Business Center. "We're proud to stand-by them as a strategic partner and to introduce the next evolution of Seagate surveillance storage with SkyHawk and an incredible 10TB capacity point."

"Libraries of digital content continue to expand, both in the home and the workplace," according to John Rydning, IDC's research vice president for hard disk drives. "Seagate's new 10TB HDD product lineup provides consumers and organizations with a range of capacious, on-premise HDD storage alternatives to the cloud that address a wide variety of storage use cases."

IronWolf and BarraCuda Pro are now shipping worldwide, and SkyHawk is currently sampling to select customers with wide-scale availability to be announced shortly. For more information on the Seagate Guardian Series and all Seagate products please visit http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives.

Rich Edmonds
Senior Editor, PC Build

Rich Edmonds was formerly a Senior Editor of PC hardware at Windows Central, covering everything related to PC components and NAS. He's been involved in technology for more than a decade and knows a thing or two about the magic inside a PC chassis. You can follow him on Twitter at @RichEdmonds.

51 Comments
  • After you format there's only 7.5TB of free space... j/k ;)
  • Just dust off the old DiskManager floppies and you're all set...
  • My 8TB Seagate drives gives me 7,27TiB after format with NTFS and standard cluster size (4K I guess)
  • The math is pretty easy to do.  You get ~9TB of usable space. 10TB in hardware manufacturer lingo is 10 x 10^12.  1TB (or TiB, to be precise) in OS lingo is 2^40.  So if you take 10 x 10^12 / 2^40, you end up with 9.095TB.  Subtract a bit of that for file system and other overhead, and 9TB is a reasonable estiamte.
  • you're right
    I wish Windows would use the units properly to prevent consumer confusion.
  • The thing is, I don't think it would prevent confusion. In fact, I'm pretty sure they stick with SI prefixes because switching to IEC prefixes would confuse people more. "What is this GiB my PC keeps showing? Where are my gigabytes?" Most users don't know or care how much space they have, so long as they don't run out. And most people don't separate hard drives. Thus, most people don't care whether their OS shows TB or TiB, and the former has 30+ years of history and momentum behind it even if it is now technically wrong.
  • More like 9.13
  • 9.31322574615478515625 GB :P
  • LOL (no signature)
  • This is before formatting. File systems do take some additional space.
  • I got 9.765625TB = 10,000MB. If they are advertising it as 10TB then you should get 10,240MB.
  • Its the difference b/w the Metric system and JEDEC system. In Metric, 1 KB = 1000 B and so on. So, by 10TB (Metric), they mean 10000000000000 B. You'll have to divide it by 2^40 to get the value in the TB for JEDEC system or TiB in IEC system. Its a bit complicated. The result would be 9.094947017729282379150390625 TB in JEDEC, which is different from the value i used before because i made an error in the calculation then. I can't delete that comment nor can i edit it. So, there you go. Another mistake of mine for the whole world to laugh at. :/
  • Wow, that's like 6 of today's AAA titles and DLC..... /s
  • Nah I have 270 on my XB1 fully downloaded and like 50-75 are triple AAA and most have DLC. All on a 5TB and still have 1.7 TB left Posted via the Windows Central App for Android
  • Lots and lots of Games
  • VERY nice!
  • How do they compare in terms of noise and reliability to Hitachi drives, thats the make or break for me (building a NAS soon)  Very good names and branding BTW.
  • Seagate is junk. Nowhere near the reliability of Hitachi. They are cheap for a reason.
  • Agreed, this is historic in that you can now lose up to 10TB of data when (not if) it crashes.
  • I don't know why you got down-voted, from my personal experience - you're spot on. I've bought Seagate drives in 2 different occasions from 2 different retailers, and they BOTH were defected out of the box. I'll never lay my hands on another Seagate drive.
  • They did not dare to mention pricing yet ...
  • It will probably take a week to format.
  • Aaaaaaand now I want to see all those cloud services stop all these shenanigans about 5gb limits. v10
  • Not sure if you're trolling, but I'll bite.  Cost to buy enough of these is a lot, cost to replace all their existing hardware is a lot, cost to migrate the backups is a lot, cost of power is a lot, cost of bandwidth is a lot.   All that on top of Seagate stuff being junk.  I had 4 different drives die on me at the same time.  It was in a RAID5.  RAID5 can't protect against 4 drives failing unless I have RAID5+4 or whatever, which needs at least 9 drives total to make sense, otherwise it'd be the same as RAID0 on 4 drives. WD Red works for me, and I've heard good things about Hitachi.   If you want "unlimited" storage, get a few Raspberry Pi's and 4-5tb drives.  Setup SyncThing (or something similar) and put them at friend's houses.  You're all the cloud for each other.  Could also install BTSync on your PC's and share files with each other.   Yes, everyone can see each other's data with these.  CrashPlan lets you sync to friends where they can't see it, could look at that too.
  • Wasnt trolling just feel like 5gb is the new version of the 5mb email limit. Feels like theyve had the same cost requirements despite the increase in HDD capacity over the years. Good thoughts on the pi for remote storage might do that at my bros place! At home I actually use a synology Nas with 8 WD Reds they are great drives. IMO very powerful os packed with features. Thanks for the thoughts and comments v10
  • Is this a plug and play to most SATA 2/3 MB or Raid Card with w10?  Sorry the biggest HD I used was a 2TB.
  • Dam, I just grabbed a 5tb drive for my Home theater PC, it would of been nicer to add a 10tb drive.... (with the 5tb new drive, the system has 14tb of storage on it, mostly movies FULL blu-ray rips with HD audio, something you CANT get from on demand or PPV)
  • "a"? I hope you have some sort of raid setup or don't mind ripping it all again.
  • That's like 25,000 albums or a 1000 hrs of hd video for you people living in your parents basement.
  • Yea and they'll only last u about 5 years
  • Seagate. When you absolutely, positively must lose every bit of data you have.
  • They should have worked on making their smaller drives reliable first. This just means you can lose more data at once now.
  • I think this is cool, but I'll wait for Western Digital to release a ten TB Black drive before I consider buying one.
  • Scary. I for one know all too well what happens when a big drive fails. Of course I have my backups spread across multiple drives. An average consumer though that uses this for phone photos, music, videos, etc... would cry not if, when it fails. All drives will at some point whether it's Hitichi, Seagate, WD, etc... I'm not sure bigger is better here.
  • I think that's a risk on mobile drives too. I have some 1TB external USB 3.0 drives and some of them come with platic protection against falls, its like smartphones, as long as you have a good cover to protect you you're fine. 
  • I would like to get one of these with 10TB but external, backwards compatible with USB 3.0, since I haven't switched to USB 3.1 TypeC hardware yet.
  • Can I fit the internet on it? :P
  • you might be able to if you don't download social media, video sharing or porno sites ... Brazzers and Pornhub are pretty large
  • I want a exa-byte drive...just one :) Then I can say I have the internet in my pocket. :P
  • just hope it's not made by Seagate ... you might lose the internet
  • ok then, let's take the bait, what happened? you had a Seagate drive once and it broke so all Seagate drives are crap and will break? Is that your story? as a video production specialist I have used many dozens of Seagate drives and none of them have failed and that's putting up with daily read write in the hundreds of GB range. does that mean they won't fail ever? of course not because sometimes stuff breaks which is why you have a backup. so you, and the rest of the Seagate haters in this thread (who knew that was a thing?) just shush because you had a drive that failed and it was made by Seagate which you only noticed after it failed, probably. Cue the guy from above with the Raid 5 with a link to some charts or whatever... #pony
  • Looking forward to a 10PB DNA drive from MS, should resolve all the risk of drive failures lol still my 1TB with Office 365 is more than enough for me and never have to worry about loosing anything.
  • I'll have to get one of these for when my "unlimited" onedrive space gets turned into just 1TB next year
  • about 12 years ago, I bought a 500GBB ext. hard drive, and thought it would never be filled up, but I was wrong. Then 4 yrs later a 3TB hard drive, same thought, i was wrong again. now we 'll see on 10TB hard drive  
  • My 1st PC came with 450MB Hard Drive, 4mb RAM LoL shhhhh
  • I'd rather have 10 1TB drives. A lot less loss when it fails.
  • People still use mechanical drives?
  • Neh, I just want high capacity SSD, I'm done buying those rotary HDDs.
  • Leave it to WindowsCentral to write a non-techical quickie article.....Not one mention of the TECH behind these drives, simply the fact that these are Seagate's new HELIUM filled drives which allows them to reach these capacties while still in the same 3.5' form factor is an amazing advancement....
  • Sorry for my ignorance, if it has helium means that if its perfored or destroyed it might explode?
  • I've had really good luck with seagate drives. I guess im lucky? Lol. But yeah 2 10tb raid 1 should be perfect for my needs. Hopefully they don't break the bank.