The ever-growing need of storage for countless image files, video clips, and audio logs is one of the biggest plights that media content creators face. As SSDs are great for their rapid speed, they are not cost-effective for raw storage and archiving. For that, spinning disk drives still remain king.

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The overall reliability and performance of traditional HDDs have increased over the years, allowing for even bigger drives to be produced. Seagate has just announced a triad of 12TB hard drives for the consumer market; the 12 TB IronWolf, 12 TB IronWolf Pro, and 12 TB BarraCuda Pro.

“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.”

Part of Seagate’s Guardian series, the new 7200rpm 3.5-inch hard drives boast a large 256MB cache size and sustained data transfer rates up to 250MB/s. According to Seagate, the new BarraCuda Pro is “the fastest, highest-capacity and most reliable hard drive for desktop computing available on the market today.”

  • 12 TB BarraCuda Pro
    • For Consumer Desktops, Workstations, and home servers
    • Maximum Sustained Transfer – 250 MB/s
    • Rated Workload – 300 TB/yr
    • 5-year warranty (2 years data recovery service included)
  •  12 TB IronWolf
    • For 1-8 Bay NAS Enclosures
    • Maximum Sustained Transfer – 210 MB/s
    • Rated Workload – 180 TB/yr
    • 3-year warranty
  • 12 TB IronWolf Pro
    • For 1-16 Bay NAS Enclosures
    • Maximum Sustained Transfer – 250 MB/s
    • Rated Workload – 300 TB/yr
    • 5-year warranty (2 years data recovery service included)

The IronWolf class drives designed with firmware for used in a NAS device like the ones offered by Synology and QNAP. Professionals who use these devices will soon benefit from Seagate’s IronWolf Health Management, which improves the overall system reliability by displaying actionable prevention, intervention or recovery options for the user.

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Building and learning from past failures, Seagate has solidified their position in the consumer HDD market. With the new drives, they currently have the largest-capacity drives for both desktop and NAS markets.  The new dives are available at B&H for $480 for the 12 TB IronWolf, $490 for the 12 TB BarraCuda Pro, and $520 for the 12 TB IronWolf Pro.