Solid state drives have long held the local storage performance crown, with the gap between hard drives and flash storage growing even bigger ever since M.2 PCI Express drives appeared. However, mechanical hard drives still win if your main concern is the amount of storage offered. Today, Seagate just reminded us of the gulf that exists between HDD and SSD in this regard by launching three different flavors of 14TB hard drives.
You may have noticed a common theme in recent years from the hard drive manufacturers. It's not just a case of offering hard drives of different capacities anymore, instead we get a choice based on what we intend to use the drive for. Will it be for general use in a desktop computer? Used as part of a NAS? Or part of a system dedicated to a single task such as recording video?
With that in mind, Seagate today launched 14TB versions of its Barracuda (compute), IronWolf (NAS), and SkyHawk (surveillance) hard drives.
The 14TB drives replace the 12TB models at the top of Seagate's offerings. For your consumer general purpose desktop PC, the 14TB Barracuda Pro is the drive to pick. It spins at 7,200rpm and is complemented by a 256MB cache allowing for sustained data rates of 250MB/s. The drive ships with a five year warranty complete with 300TB/year workload limit. Seagate also includes two years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, giving you peace of mind about data recovery.
There's actually two 14TB NAS drives available in the form of the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro. The IronWolf includes a drive Health Management system, Rotational Vibration sensors, and each drive is designed to be always-on. The warranty is three years and Seagate sets the drive life expectancy at one million hours. The differences for the IronWolf Pro are the inclusion of two years of Rescue Data Recovery and the drive life increasing to 1.2 million hours combined with a five year warranty.
Finally, we have the SkyHawk, which is meant for surveillance operations. Each drive includes ImagePerfect firmware to ensure seamless video capture, a Health Management system, the ability to record from up to 64 HD cameras at once, and is backed by a three year warranty with drive life set at one million hours. If you've got a network video recorder or surveillance DVR, then this is the drive for you. At 14TB it can record over 9,345 hours of HD video, which is 389 days worth.
As Tom's Hardware reports, the 14TB Barracuda Pro is expected to cost $580, the 14TB IronWolf costs $530, and the IronWolf Pro version is $600. Finally, the 14TB SkyHawk is expected to be $510. As for availability, they go on sale from today, but it could be a while before stock arrives at your preferred retailer.