Seagate Barracuda Pro 12TB review: A speedy storage solution

Data storage has become one of the most important factors in the computing space. The requirements have seen a tremendous increase over the last few years. Both cloud and local storage requirements continue to be served through hard drives where workloads are sequential or not performance sensitive.

Although cloud services and video streaming have managed to curb the need for huge amounts of local storage, not everyone has the bandwidth or the desire to keep everything on someone's else's machine. Hard drives are still one of the cheapest options for bulk and rarely accessed storage. This is something Seagate has excelled for many years.

Seagate is one of the three companies that target the desktop storage market with high capacity storage drives. The company launched the 10TB Barracuda Pro Pro last year, and now we have the 12TB follow-up. So we managed to get our hands on the drive and used it for a while. Let's find out if it's worth the price.

Key Specifications of Barracuda Pro 12TB

Performance

The new Barracuda Pro is all about speed for local pools on desktops and workstations. It has been long since we have seen HDDs since a lot of vendors are switching over to solid-state drives.

The new HDD is a 7200RPM SATAIII 8-platter PMR, a helium-filled drive which is made for high performance and high density for local storage on PCs. While the speed doesn't match with an SSD, its price makes up for the loss. It comes with a 5-year warranty and a 2-year data recovery service. It is also one of the highest capacity drives available in the market, with almost all others being NAS or Enterprise solutions.

We tested the device using the Parkdale benchmarks. And the speeds were really impressive. We got a sequential write speed of 239.6 MB/sec and a sequential read speed of 245.6 MB/sec. The numbers are really impressive compared to what we were getting from our original drives. The original offered a sequential write speed of 68.9 MB/sec and a sequential read speed of 90.8 MB/sec.

It's imperative to note that with all hard drives, the transfer rates vary according to where the data is on the platter. As more data is written to the drive, speeds may drop.
The Baracuda Pro 12TB had no heating issues, it only ran mildly warm during the tests, and was relatively quiet. You might hear a sound occasionally but buried inside a cabinet the noise level is forgivable.

My Cloud Home: Unboxing and Set Up

Should you buy?

The Barracuda Pro 12TB is without a doubt an impressive product. It's not very often we come across high capacity hard drive built for full-time operation with workload ratings of 300TB/year. The read and write speeds are really good and helps increase productivity.

The Barracuda Pro 12TB will be a good alternative for gamers and users who deal with content creation allowing them to use the drive as a direct-attached storage system. Priced at Rs 38,000, it is an ideal choice for a high-end desktop.

Seagate also has the IronWolf Pro in its arsenal that is Rs 1,000 pricier than the former. The latter also offers a higher load/unload cycle rating. It is unlikely that you will see a difference in the performance of both the drives, but the company believes that the users won't go wrong with their choice, regardless of the end application.