Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB HDD Review - MMORPG.com

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Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB HDD Review - MMORPG.com

As 4K gaming and content creation push into the mainstream, storage demands are also on the rise. While SSDs are clearly the wave of the future for your most used programs, they’re still not cost efficient enough for mass storage. Today, we’re looking at the first Helium-based HDD we’ve ever tested and at only $.04 per gigabyte, it could be an excellent value if the performance holds up. Read on for our full review.

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Darksworm

Gameplay Capture to a platter drive while playing a game that streams textures is a recipe for destroying your gameplay (hope it isn't a PvP game). You basically need another HDD to write the captures to, that isn't holding your games, if you're going to go that route... or just put everything on an SSD...

These are not a solution to any problem, except raw capacity. Those speeds are theoretical and simply don't happen in the real world... These 4K games have huge textures and your load times are going to be laughable with a latter drive - like a console game. I recommend just uninstalling the games you aren't playing at the time and loading them up only when needed. Upgrade your internet connection. Use a SATA3 SSD for game storage.

I tried the "big desktop hard drive"/laptop SSHD route. It doesn't work well. It feels awful.

Quizzical

These aren't even much of a solution to raw capacity, unless you also need high density. One 12 TB hard drive costs a lot more than three 4 TB hard drives. If your storage needs are most naturally measured in petabytes, so that going with a bunch of 4 TB hard drives means that you need three times as many servers to hold them as if you buy 12 TB hard drives, then something like this makes a ton of sense. For consumer use, not so much.

Teala

Great HD for setting up an NAS. Just one of these HD's could store upwards of 3000+ movies in 1080p format, and 10's of thousands of hours of music. Add two and you could have a home based server for hosting games like Conan Exile.

Quizzical

Darksworm said:

I tried the "big desktop hard drive"/laptop SSHD route. It doesn't work well. It feels awful.

If you genuinely mean SSHD, then that's just pairing one hard drive with another hard drive.  Neither is substantially similar to an SSD.  Yes, the SSHD has a little bit of NAND, but an ordinary hard drive has a little bit of DRAM, and that doesn't make it perform like a ramdisk.

If that was a typo and you had an actual SSD paired with the hard drive, then that's totally different.  In that case, anything you had on the SSD should have felt fine.  Only programs run off of the hard drive would be sluggish.

miawan

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

Quizzical

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

But what if the hard drive where your data is stored in the cloud is one of these?  Or three of them as part of a RAID 6 array.

DarkHigh

Quizzical said:

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

But what if the hard drive where your data is stored in the cloud is one of these?  Or three of them as part of a RAID 6 array.

I disagree with a lot of what you are saying but this one made me laugh. Double parity with 3 drives lol

Vrika

Quizzical said:

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

But what if the hard drive where your data is stored in the cloud is one of these?  Or three of them as part of a RAID 6 array.

Then the drives are useless to me since I'm getting my data storage from the cloud.

I'm not really that interested on whether people running the clouds need them or not.

Quizzical

DarkHigh said:

Quizzical said:

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

But what if the hard drive where your data is stored in the cloud is one of these?  Or three of them as part of a RAID 6 array.

I disagree with a lot of what you are saying but this one made me laugh. Double parity with 3 drives lol

What I meant was something like a server with 15 hard drives, each of which are 12 TB, in RAID 6, for 156 TB of storage in total.

The cloud has to have some sort of backup or redundancy, or else the data that you put there would sometimes disappear.

Grunty

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

A few months ago I would have been essentially without a computer in that scenario.  Not because of the loss of my data on a cloud server somewhere but because there was a fire at a major internet distribution point owned by my ISP.  It knocked out DSL service for about three days in a significant part on Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.  I'd rather have my admittedly inconsequential data on my local storage than in someone else's control.

Vrika

Grunty said:

miawan said:

With connection speeds rapidly increasing, soon people will just use a remote cloud drive with unlimited storage/ automatic backups making these sort of drives useless.

A few months ago I would have been essentially without a computer in that scenario.  Not because of the loss of my data on a cloud server somewhere but because there was a fire at a major internet distribution point owned by my ISP.  It knocked out DSL service for about three days in a significant part on Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas.  I'd rather have my admittedly inconsequential data on my local storage than in someone else's control.

Mobile internet is solving that problem.

I had a my broadband cut off for 4 days due to maintenance about 2 years ago and needed another solution. A pre-paid SIM card with unlimited bandwidth for a week cost 5€ and offered about 10 mbps.

foppotee

One could place whole libraries on such hard drives lol.

dave6660

DMKano said:

Teala said:

Great HD for setting up an NAS. Just one of these HD's could store upwards of 3000+ movies in 1080p format, and 10's of thousands of hours of music. Add two and you could have a home based server for hosting games like Conan Exile.

The thing is - with how prevalent streaming is - there is literally no reason to store 3000+ movies locally - again just my 2c.

High bandwidth lines enable high bit streams without any issues.

Coupled with cloud storage - there is very little reason to keep local file storage other than for backup/disaster recovery purposes in case online storage is down.

Again - I just see massive local storage being obsolete in most cases.

But the minute you cancel your subscription to your streaming service or your internet connection dies, you have 0 movies.  But I'm old fashion that way, when I buy something I like to have it in my possession.

Ginaz

I can't this being a viable consumer product. Most people will do more than fine with a 500GB SSD and 2-4TB HD. This seems like something that might be targeted towards business or some kind of specialized tech purpose.

Quizzical

Ginaz said:

I can't this being a viable consumer product. Most people will do more than fine with a 500GB SSD and 2-4TB HD. This seems like something that might be targeted towards business or some kind of specialized tech purpose.

Just because they built it for data centers or other enterprise use doesn't mean that they can't offer it to consumers, too.  On New Egg, there are 4 TB hard drives with thousands of reviews.  The only way that any 12 TB or larger hard drive got to even 10 reviews is by sharing reviews with other drives of smaller capacities.