The 10TB Barracuda Pro doesn’t play just the capacity card though. Seagate also aimed to make it a high-performance hard drive, fitting it with a massive 256MB of cache. The drive also spins along at 7,200rpm rather than the typical, lower-cost 5,400rpm large drives.
Of course, "performance hard drive" may sound like an oxymoron in this age of
SSDs that can easily hit 1.5GBps read speeds, but all things considered, the 3.5-inch Barracuda Pro is still fairly peppy, with rated a 220MBps sustained transfer rate. Well, for a hard drive anyway.
The Barracuda Pro uses Conventional Magnetic Recording and doesn’t resort to sealing the drive and filling it with helium or exotic magnetic technology to achieve its high capacity. Officials say it’s built on a seven-platter design, which usually means more power consumption due to the number of spinning platters. But in this case, Seagate says it’s one of the more efficient drives around.
According to Seagate, the drive consumes just 6.8 watts during seek and 4.5 watts during idle, which indeed makes it fairly low-power by hard drive standards.
