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Seagate today announced a new line of hard drives with up to 10TB of capacity for desktops computers, network-attached storage (NAS) and surveillance systems. The high-capacity drives, dubbed the Guardian Series, represent a 2TB increase over the capacity of previous Seagate hard drives in the consumer and small business category. The Guardian series consists of the BarraCuda Pro desktop drive, the Seagate IronWolf for NAS applications and the Seagate SkyHawk for video surveillance systems. Seagate also said it has resurrected the Barracuda brand for its line of consumer desktop and laptop hard drives, a name it did away with in favor of the "Desktop Hard Drive" brand a few years ago. Seagate changed the spelling to "BarraCuda." The standard BarraCuda line now includes hard disk drives with spindle speeds ranging from 5,900rpm to 7,200rpm and capacities ranging from 500GB to 10TB. The drives also come with 16GB to 64GB of DRAM cache, depending on the overall capacity, and are being offered in 2.5-in. laptop form factors and 3.5-in. desktop sizes. The thinnest 2.5-in. BarraCuda drive is 7mm thick, small enough for ultrathin notebooks; it offers up to 2TB of capacity. The updated BarraCuda drive line will offer sustained data transfer rates of up to 210MB/s. The 2TB models will retail for $81 and the 3TB models will sell for $100. Seagate also announced a new drive for PC "enthusiasts," the BarraCuda Pro, which comes in capacities of up to 10TB. The drive has a 7,200rpm spindle speed and a data transfer rate of up to 220MB/s, and comes with a five-year limited warranty. That's more than twice the typical two-year BarraCuda HDD warranty. "BarraCuda Pro offers the highest PC Compute spin speed at 7200 RPM for 3.5-in. HDD drives on the market," said Chris Deardorff, a Seagate senior marketing strategist. The drive also comes with Seagate's Self-Encryption Drive (SED) technology, which password protects data on the drive but also allows users to crypto-erase it by changing the encryption key, ensuring no one can access it. The BarraCuda Pro can sustain up to 55TB of data writes per year, according to Deardorff. The 10TB BarraCuda Pro will retail for $535. Another hard drive announced today in the BarraCuda lineup is the FireCuda, which is aimed at gamers and comes in both 2.5-in. and 3.5-in. Form factors, and either 1TB or 2TB of capacities. The FireCuda is a solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD), which means it uses a small amount (8GB) of NAND flash as a caching element to increase performance up to five times over standard BarraCuda drives. Data is first written to the NAND flash prior to the hard drive, which enables higher performance considering the spindle speed is just 5,900rpm. The drive has a maximum sustained read rate of 210MB/s. Seagate has been selling SSHDs since 2011, so the FireCuda is not new technology. The FireCuda will retail for $85 for a 1TB drive, $110 for the 2TB model. For small businesses, Seagate has refreshed its NAS drive lineup with the IronWolf brand. The IronWolf is aimed at NAS devices with one to 16 drive bays and comes with up to 10TB capacity and Seagate's AgileArray (formely NASworks) software on it. AgileArray technology supports error recovery controls, power management and vibration tolerance for reliability when used in multi-bay NAS devices. The IronWolf, which is rated for up to 180TB of writes per year, sports a higher resiliency than other Seagate drive models with a one million meantime before failure (MTBF) rating, according to Jennifer Bradfield, a Seagate senior director of product marketing. The drive can also power down into a sleep mode while not being used, sipping only .8 watts of power compared with the 6.8 watts of power it uses while active. The IronWolf HDDs offer a Rescue Data Recovery Service plan that protects against data loss from viruses, software issues, or mechanical and electrical breakdowns in a NAS or RAID environment. A failed drive can be sent back to Seagate where its in-house "Rescue Service" will attempt to retrieve data. The drive also comes with a three-year limited warranty. The IronWolf 10TB HDD will retail for $470. Seagate's new SkyHawk HDD lineup is a rebrand of the previous Sv35 series video surveillance hard drive. The new 7,200rpm drive comes with up to 10TB of capacity for storing up to 10,000 hours of HD video. It also comes with ImagePerfect firmware from MTC Technology. The firmware, which allows the drive to be used by motion-sensing cameras, powers down the drive when it's not in use to reduce power consumption and heat generation. It then powers up quickly to provide uninterrupted recording. Like the IronWolf, the SkyHawk drives use rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and it can support up to 64 HD cameras -- more than any other drive on the market, according to Aubrey Muhlach, Seagate's Worldwide Surveillance Segment marketing manager. Designed for modern, high-resolution systems running around the clock, SkyHawk drives also come with a data recovery services option. The SkyHawk HDD supports up to 180TB worth of data writes per year, has a one million hour MTBF and a three-year limited warranty. The 10TB SkyHawk HDD will retail for $460. Source: ComputerWorld View the full article

When it comes to technology, it is almost impossible to stay on the forefront. You will drive yourself nuts, and empty your wallet, chasing after every new thing. Got the newest and most expensive graphics card? Yesterday's news within months. The newest iPhone? You can make that claim for one year at best. Hard drives are no different and are probably the longest-running way for manufacturers to take money from nerds. I bought a 4TB drive earlier in the year thinking it would be high-end for some time, but sure enough, it is now yawn-worthy. Why? Today, Seagate begins shipping 8TB hard drives. Yup, twice as big as my 4TB drive. I haven't learned my lesson though as I already want one! "A cornerstone for growing capacities in multiple applications, the 8TB hard drive delivers bulk data storage solutions for online content storage providing customers with the highest capacity density needed to address an ever increasing amount of unstructured data in an industry-standard 3.5-inch HDD. Providing up to 8TB in a single drive slot, the drive delivers maximum rack density, within an existing footprint, for the most efficient data center floor space usage possible", says Seagate. The manufacturer further explains, "the 8TB hard disk drive increases system capacity using fewer components for increased system and staffing efficiencies while lowering power costs. With its low operating power consumption, the drive reliably conserves energy thereby reducing overall operating costs. Helping customers economically store data, it boasts the best Watts/GB for enterprise bulk data storage in the industry". In other words, you can free up SATA connectors and lower energy costs by utilizing one drive instead of multiple. Think of it this way; I already own a 4TB drive. If I add a second 4TB drive instead of replacing the first with an 8TB variant, I will be wasting a SATA port and using more electricity. For a home user, this isn't a huge deal, but in a server environment, it can really add up. Over time, the savings could justify the cost. Cost is the big mystery though, as Seagate has not announced an MSRP. However, it is shipping a limited supply of the drives to select retailers and will open it up to more later in the year. Expect them to be expensive, at least for the time being. Hopefully they will work in existing USB enclosures, so laptop and Surface users can enjoy the fun too. Do you need 8TB of storage on your home computer? What are you storing? Tell me in the comments. View the full article

In November, online backup provider Backblaze published some interesting statistics on hard drive mortality based on over 25,000 units in active service. It found that failure rates were higher in the first 18 months and after three years. Those conclusions matched the findings of other studies on the subject, but frustratingly, they didn't include information on specific makes and models. Today, Backblaze is naming names. The firm has posted details on failure rates for 15 different consumer-grade hard drives, and the numbers don't look good for Seagate. See for yourself: And that doesn't even tell the whole story. In Backblaze's storage pods, Seagate's Barracuda 1.5TB has an annual failure rate of over 25%. The 5,400-RPM version of that drive fares better—its failure rate is only 10%—but that's still pretty high compared to the competition. The failure rate of similar Hitachi drives in the same environment is less than 2%. Only 10% of the hard drives in Backblaze's storage pods come from WD, and they're strictly low-power Green and Red models. The annual failure rates are pretty low, though: only 3-4%. Backblaze's purchasing decisions are largely driven by price, which is probably why fewer WD drives are in the mix. They tend to be a little pricier. Interestingly, two drives proved to be so unreliable in Backblaze's storage pods that they were left out of the totals completely. Seagate's Barracuda LP 2TB and WD's Green 3TB "start accumulating errors as soon as they are put into production," the company says. It thinks vibration might be part of the problem. Other Barracuda LP and Green models seem unfazed, though. Here's a look at survival rates over time: After three years, only about three quarters of the Seagate drives remain. A surprising number of those failures come between 18 and 24 months, which contradicts the overall trend noted in Backblaze's initial study. Infant mortality seems to be a bigger problem for the WD drives, while the Hitachis fail at a steady but slow rate. Backblaze says the Seagate drives are also more prone to dropping out of RAID arrays prematurely. The company uses consumer-grade drives that aren't designed explicitly for RAID environments, of course, but that doesn't seem to bother the Hitachis. They spend just 0.01% of their time in so-called "trouble" states, compared to 0.17% for the WD drives and 0.28% for the Seagates. Overall, Backblaze's data suggests that Seagate drives are less reliable than their peers. That matches my own experiences with a much smaller sample size, and it may influence our future recommendations in the System Guide. Hmm. In the meantime, kudos to Backblaze for not only collecting this data, but also publishing a detailed breakdown. View the full article

Seagate and LaCie have gotten friendly before -- the former company's drives are in the LaCie 2big Thunderbolt HDD, for instance -- but the storage makers are about to get even cozier. Today, Seagate announced its plans to buy a 64.5-percent share in the French company, which is currently valued at $186 million. The acquisition will combine the two outlets' product portfolios and, according to the press release, "accelerate Seagate's growth strategy in the expanding consumer storage market, particularly in Europe and Japan." The deal should go through by late 2012, and Seagate will bring over LaCie CEO Philippe Spruch to head the consumer storage products division. Source: EnGadget View the full article