Seagate Launches 12TB IronWolf & Barracuda Pro Hard Drives

Seagate has released its latest tear of hard drives for the performance segment, looking at not just high-capacity, but high speed, too. The drives fall under Seagate’s IronWolf range for network storage, and Barracuda Pro for desktops, extending them to 12TB, up from 10TB. Both drives are helium filled to allow for more platters and thus, higher density.

The IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives are Seagate’s answer to WD Red drives, and are suitable for RAID setups and network storage in high density environments. The drives have custom firmware to speed up error recovery in a RAID setup, while also including AgileArray and dual-plane balancing to counteract vibration and mechanical noise which can slow the drives down when packed together in tight enclosures. The standard drive is rated for 180TB of data transfer per year, with the Pro extending this to 300TB per year.

Typically, this would be the end of the usual marketing material, same drive, bigger capacity, but Seagate does in fact have a new feature up its sleeve. This ties in with NAS providers like Synology, QNAP and Asustor, and that’s the IronWolf Health Management (IHM) software that will be released later this year, and circulated to NAS providers. As the name suggests, it’s a health monitoring solution that will come with NAS units later on, and will work as an extension to the rather spotty record that is SMART monitoring.

IHM analyzes multiple parameters related to drive health and uses proprietary algorithms to determine their impact to drive health. With this output and information on additional operating conditions such as temperature and humidity, IHM recommends preventive actions to users to avoid any drive damage. It may also recommend specific interventions when the drive health is likely to have been impacted.

As densities increase, so too does the chance of a fatal error. Preventing or taking action before a problem occurs, becomes increasingly important. How this software will work and what options it provides, will likely come down to how the NAS manufacturers implement IHM. With that, we’ll have to wait and see, although we’ve reached out to NAS providers to get some early feedback on this.

The Barracuda Pro is the high performance drive for desktop computers, and does this with its 250MB/s transfer speed, over the IronWolf’s 210MB/s, but it doesn’t come with all the extra vibration dampening stuff. It does, however, come with a 5 year warranty, plus 2 years of data recovery via Seagate Rescue, meaning if the drive fails in the first two years, you can send the drive off to Seagate and they’ll pull off any data they can.

Both the IronWolf and Barracuda drives come with 256MB of cache, which has become common in large density drives over 6TB, and the drives only use 7.8W of power in operation, likely due to the motor doing less work in the helium sealed environment.

As expected, the drives are not cheap, but they are some of the highest density drives on the market. The standard IronWolf 12TB will set you back about $470, while the IronWolf Pro 12TB is $540, and the Barracuda Pro 12TB, $530.