There is nothing like adding a drive that massively adjusts for a system’s growing pains as you get close to outgrowing the space you already have. With the increased popularity of media servers at home and business and increase in higher resolutions such as 4K and eventually above, the demand for higher drive capacities is a never ending race. Not to mention enterprise use for cloud and datacenter solutions. SSD has becoming more of a hit across the board, but it doesn’t quite resolve the demand for large capacity just yet. Thus, HDD is still alive as ever as it continues to fill this gap with incredible increases each year.
In this race Seagate has introduced a line of 12TB hard drives to three of their latest hard drive collections, including the new IronWolf, IronWolf Pro and BarraCuda Pro series. Although these companies have been hinting to capacities around 20GB and shooting for better, 12TB is available now, is ready for your data consumption and more than fulfills the needs of most users (with the exception of large datacenters). The new drives offer capacities “up to” 12TB, typically giving alternative options including 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB and 10TB.
Of course, the average user won’t want to bother with the 12TB drives just yet since they are priced for what they are and mostly suitable for the budgets of mid to large scale companies and datacenters. The price typically falls around $450-$550+ per unit, making the price of the smaller options more attractive. It may also be slightly more affordable to get two of the 6TB solutions and run them in a RAID configuration. Regardless, it is nice to know that we still have plenty of capacity to expand into as our demands grow (and that the price of the smaller drives are falling even more).
