Seagate stops producing Barracuda Pro desktop drives

• SMR I detect WD 1

• SMR recording consists in the fact that the individual tracks overlap, so it is possible to achieve a higher data density with the same track width (Source: WD)

• SMR recording consists in the fact that the individual tracks overlap, so it is possible to achieve a higher data density with the same track width (Source: WD)

• When rewriting a track, it is therefore necessary to cascade overwrite the following (Source: Seagate)

• When writing a certain range of data to SMR, the header also hits the next track as it is written (Source: Seagate)

• The plate is divided into zones that end with a non-overlapping track, where it is possible to end the cascade rewriting. Otherwise the entire surface would have to be overwritten (Source: ZonedStorage.io)

• The SMR record increases capacity while maintaining production costs without adding plates. It is especially useful for archiving and storing data, on the contrary, it is not suitable when the HDD often writes and overwrites data (Source: Seagate)

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Attention, 7200RPM Barracuda Pro desktop drives without SMR will soon disappear from Seagate’s offer. Only ordinary Barracudas will remain, but they are SMR and with a capacity of only up to 8 TB. The company is said to be working on new generations of disks and should hopefully release a replacement in the future, but it’s hard to say when it will be.

Last summer, the hardware world was moved by the cause of SMR disks – so-called shingled magnetic recording (SMR) settled in many hard disks at the time, without being reported. The Seagate range of traditional Barracuda desktop HDDs already has SMR recording, and if you wanted normal recording (CMR), you had to buy Barracuda Pro discs. Unfortunately, they will now disappear from the market, Seagate has now announced the end of their production.

Seagate has announced that it is removing the Barracuda Pro 3.5 ″ HDD desktop line from the offer and it looks relatively fast. The product is no longer on her website, where you will only find 3.5 ″ Barracudas without the Pro attribute. The disks could last a while in the sales network, but when today’s stocks are exhausted, it will probably not be possible to buy them.

The end of the Barracuda Pro series creates a fairly large hole in the offer of desktop disks. Conventional 3.5 Bar Barracuda drives have a maximum capacity of 8 TB and always have SMR recording, so they are not suitable for more demanding workloads, where they would write many files and / or large amounts of data at once. In addition, standard Barracuda discs are always 5400 rpm, ie with lower power.

In contrast, the Barracuda Pro HDDs were 7200 rpm, used conventional magnetic recording without complications of SMR and also offered much larger capacities. This series has models with up to 14TB capacity (which are already helium-filled disks), so throwing it out of the Seagate menu is missing such a large HDD for desktop computers. This will narrow the choice and competition in this market.

However, the company has disks with these parameters (7200 RPM, CMR, up to 18 TB) so far in the IronWolf Pro series. It is designed for NAS, it will have a differently tuned firmware (it can probably also be noisier movement of the heads) and therefore this HDD may not behave perfectly in the desktop. But these HDDs are probably the closest alternative. Plus, of course, you have a choice of discs from competitors, such as the Toshiba N300 and WD Red Pro (also for NASs) or WD Gold.

This should not mean that Seagate resigns to high-capacity drives. The company states that it is currently reorganizing its offer and preparing new generations of HDDs, in which something like today’s Barracuda Pro should be there again. Although it is possible that with slightly different parameters and with a different name, it is not entirely certain whether, for example, the guarantee that the record is not an SMR will be maintained.

However, the company did not say how long it would take for this compensation to come, so it could easily be a year. The question is why Barracuda Pro discs could not last in production until then and then they were replaced smoothly, but we will not do anything about it.

Source: Tom’s Hardware