I know, I know. That pathetic 4TB hard drive just isn’t cutting it for storing your collection of rare memes. You’ve had to use an external drive, or *shudder* Dropbox to handle the overflow.
But never fear! For the surprisingly low price of $535, Seagate will sell you a 10TB drive with a five year warranty, complete overkill for basically anyone’s storage needs.
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The new Barracuda Pro is the first 10TB drive aimed at home users, although not the first 10TB drive available to buy. The real difference between the Barracuda and other 10TB drives is the workload: the new drive is specced to handle 300TB of data writing per year, which should be plenty for everyone.
The Pro drive also includes a multi-tier cache, which helps the drive handle different kinds of storage media. The result should be a drive that’s more efficient and a little bit faster, helping offset the inherent speed disadvantage of hard drives versus solid-state drives.
Although most of us won’t need a 10TB drive any time soon, it’s a handy reminder that solid-state drives aren’t the only game left in town for storage drives. Good though SSDs might be, they remain expensive, and degrade much faster with use versus HDDs.
Mostly though, I’m just in awe that you can buy a 10TB drive for $500 these days. I remember spending about that much to upgrade the hard drive in my first Dell computer from 80GB to 160GB years ago. Filling up that drive seemed difficult back in the day, but I really can’t imagine running out of room on a 10TB drive.
