Storage giant Seagate have announced they are to release solid state drives (SSDs) under the Barracuda brand, with up to 2TB of storage.
Seagate is one of the biggest names in the hard drive business, and they’ve been producing hard drives for enterprise-level systems and PCs with their Barracuda and Ironwolf series of hard disk drives for years. But while HDDs have typically been the focus of Seagate, this looks set to change with the announcement of a series of solid state drives (SSDs) under the Barracuda brand. Now, Seagate offers hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs)
Seagate have had SSDs on the market for quite a while – it’s by no means a new venture for the company. But they’ve typically been aimed at the enterprise user, with PC users being offered solid state hybrid drives (SSHDs). But the hard drive giant seems determined to change its reputation, and has just launched the Seagate Barracuda SSD, the first of its kind built specifically for PC users. It’s a relatively standard 2.5-inch SATA drive with capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB. Seagate are debuting their new Barracuda SSD drives on Amazon Prime Day, July 16th, and they’ve recently revealed the pricing – and they’re pretty modest. They’re not yet showing on the UK version of Amazon, but on the US site, the prices are listed as $74.99, $119.99 and $229.99 for the 250GB, 500GB and 1TB models, respectively (at the current exchange rate, this equates to £56.52, £90.44 and £173.34). At present, there’s no pricing for the 2TB version. Speed-wise, the drives boast maximum sequential read/write speeds of 540MB/s and 520MB/s, respectively. It also comes with a five-year warranty. It’s not currently known if performance will vary depending on the model, or the type of NAND chip Seagate will utilise.
While this is Seagate’s first foray into the world of consumer solid state drives, they’ve been producing enterprise-level SSDs for years. In 2016, at the Flash Memory Summit in California, Seagate unveiled the world’s largest SSD – coming in at a whopping 60TB! This dwarfed Samsung’s 16TB SSD that was unveiled mere months previously. For reference, 60TB is capable of storing around 400 million photos, or 12,000 movies, depending on their size. Currently, Seagate haven’t offered the monstrous SSD to businesses yet, unlike Samsung’s 16TB SSD.
