Seagate Barracuda Compute Pro 10TB HDD Review

Conclusion

There has rarely been a simpler product to sum up in the history of OC3D.

The Seagate Barracuda Compute Pro 10TB has an almost unbelievable capacity. Ten terabytes. TEN. In a world where a 1TB date drive is very much the norm, and if you’re a particularly heavy user perhaps you’ve stretched to a 2TB offering, 10TB blows our minds. You could buy a pair, run a mirrored RAID and still have enough capacity for 1600 1080P films. Anyone rich enough for a Kaleidescape system will understand the instant benefits the Seagate offering can bring.

It isn’t solely all about capacity though. Naturally a mechanical option will never match up to the high speeds capable from SSDs, but Seagate have stuffed the Barracuda Compute with enough technology to separate it from the HDDs of old and get it close, certainly in sequential tests, to some of the older regular SSDs. They have utilised DRAM buffers like the hard drives of old to help assist transfer rates, but combined these with NAND Flash and Media Cache layers to give additional performance in every read or write scenario rather than just small burst operations. Indeed as we saw from our sequential tests if you plan on dumping many gigabytes to the Barracuda then the Seagate Multi-Tier-Caching is the perfect solution, never becoming a bottleneck nor having its bandwidth too saturated to prove useful.

If you doubt the brilliance of this MTC solution to truly benefit the speeds possible on a mechanical drive then one only needs to pay close attention to our AIDA64 benchmark results where the buffered result was more than double the random and linear ones.

However, speed is nice but not really the main selling point of the Seagate Barracuda. Undoubtedly it is all about capacity, with a monstrous 10TB available it is unlikely that you’ll ever need to buy another data drive. Fortunately Seagate haven’t sacrificed everything on the altar of capacity, and the combination of 7200 RPM speed and excellent Multi-Tier-Cache mean that it has plenty of speed to match that capacity. If you fear placing all your information onto a single drive then you’ll be reassured by the fact it is all backed up by a five year warranty and Seagate even provide a two year Data Recovery option.

It’s big. It’s fast. It’s reliable. The Seagate Barracuda Compute Pro 10TB is the zenith of HDD technology.

  

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