Seagate Drops The World's Largest Tiny Hard Drive

Megalith

Megalith

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Seagate has announced a couple of new additions to their BarraCuda line, one of which is the largest-capacity 2.5-inch drive available on the market, coming in at 5TB. I wonder if the given price is for real.

The BarraCuda ST5000 pushes the capacity limit from the previous 4TB to 5TB, and will be priced around $85. Seagate says the drive uses the company’s 1TB-per-platter design that it unveiled at CES in January 2016. The same drive is also available in 4TB and 3TB models. All are 5,400rpm drives with 128MB of cache and a two-year warranty. Power consumption is rated at 2.1 watts under load and 1.1 watts while idle.
 
$85? That can't be right. If it is I need to replace 10 3TB drives lol. But uggh seagate...
 
While I dislike recent (>= 7200.11) Seagate 3.5" HDDs and would never use them (prefer HGST, Toshiba and WD),
their 2.5" HDDs have been reliable for me (have a ton of Seagate Expansion portables that I use daily).
 
I bought a hgst drive a year ago and it started clicking/not working. Couldn't send it back because it sometimes works and the shop I bought it from charges you if a return is found to be functioning. In the meantime i have had mostly seagate hdds and they have been working fine for a long time.
Im pretty sure these days all of them are made +- the same, so I just buy the one that has the features I need and has a better gb/$.
 
I bought a hgst drive a year ago and it started clicking/not working.
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Luck plays a big part when you have such a small sample set (and not hundreds to thousands where you should expect at least 1% DOA regardless of the manufacturer). This will happen for all manufacturers even enterprise drives arrive DOA.
 
What would the real world difference be between 5400rpm and 7200rpm for a Steam, Origin, ect... gaming HDD with a dedicated SSD boot drive? My kid needs a new HDD soon. At $85 or so this is an insane deal!
 
Etherton said:
What would the real world difference be between 5400rpm and 7200rpm for a Steam, Origin, ect... gaming HDD with a dedicated SSD boot drive? My kid needs a new HDD soon. At $85 or so this is an insane deal!
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I use 5400 for media / backups, 7200 for older games, ssd for current being played games. Depends on the game too really, some games will show no difference on any drive, others will load massively faster off ssd.
 
5TB 2.5" drives for $85 a pop? Holy hell, you could build a awesome tiny little NAS with six of these!
 
LurkerLito said:
$85? That can't be right. If it is I need to replace 10 3TB drives lol. But uggh seagate...
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Apparently Seagate has been a little better than Western Digital in the last little while..

Of course, that's just damning with faint praise.
 
Etherton said:
What would the real world difference be between 5400rpm and 7200rpm for a Steam, Origin, ect... gaming HDD with a dedicated SSD boot drive? My kid needs a new HDD soon. At $85 or so this is an insane deal!
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You can always set up an SSD cache to cache the slower HDD. It works quite well, especially if you have say a 256GB SSD dedicated to caching a large HDD.

MaxVeloSSD is a good one. Some motherboards also support SSD caching with 3rd party SATA chipsets (Marvell). The newer Intel chipsets support it as well with RST, but the max size of the cache in that case is 64GB I believe.
 
Etherton said:
What would the real world difference be between 5400rpm and 7200rpm for a Steam, Origin, ect... gaming HDD with a dedicated SSD boot drive? My kid needs a new HDD soon. At $85 or so this is an insane deal!
Click to expand...
$85 has to be a typo.

Nothing wrong with putting games on a regular hard drive. Loading a level or whatever into memory takes a bit longer but actual gameplay is exactly the same.
 
Now if only norco would release a cheap quiet 2.5" chassis to go with these, i can finally move my storage array out of the garage into the living room AV stack without all the noise pollution. A definitive group buy moment.
 
$65 for a 5TB drive could be a hint about incoming SSD price decreases. But with Seagate 5TB external HDDs currently costing $131 on amazon, I too wonder if someone dropped a "1" on the way to the price quote.
 
Why would they "drop" it before it even ships?
LOL, try not to be too street when writing a headline.
 
DeathFromBelow said:
$85 has to be a typo.

Nothing wrong with putting games on a regular hard drive. Loading a level or whatever into memory takes a bit longer but actual gameplay is exactly the same.
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Ugh, I'll never go back to loading the OS/apps/games from a mechanical.
Even a lousy SSD feels better than the fastest 7200rpm. Now a 15k-rpm drive was something else :)


Eulogy said:
Keep in mind these are 15mm tall, not 7mm.
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No biggie, that's how all "high" capacity 2.5" HDDs start out.
Heck, I still have some > 9mm 2TBs in service here and there.
 
WhoBeDaPlaya said:
Ugh, I'll never go back to loading the OS/apps/games from a mechanical.
Even a lousy SSD feels better than the fastest 7200rpm. Now a 15k-rpm drive was something else :)
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Joe Desktop User isn't the intended market for these.
 
evilsofa said:
$65 for a 5TB drive could be a hint about incoming SSD price decreases. But with Seagate 5TB external HDDs currently costing $131 on amazon, I too wonder if someone dropped a "1" on the way to the price quote.
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This has nothing to do with hints about anything. The idea that SSD prices necessarily drive magnetic spinner prices down is a myth. In reality, magnetic storage has actually crept up steadily in the past few years despite SSD prices having continued to fall.
 
There is the fact that magnetic shipments on the high end are already heavily impacted by SSDs so we really shouldn't expect the same margins possible when they were shipping huge volumes. Now that each drive stores terabytes of data you don't really need to buy these things as regularly as in the old days. Now if internet speeds scaled as fast as storage maybe things worked be different. With 1TB per month caps, you'd need months to fill a drive if that were all you were doing. I can't really fault manufacturers for trying to milk the dying horse, at least they're all just investing into SSDs while waiting the storage singularity when prices hit parity.
 
There's just no possible way this could retail for $85 for a 5TB drive. The sheer amount of research and development to create such a drive would force the cost - of course we'd include the physical parts and manufacturing expenses into this as well - to be closer to $285 I'd say. It's got to be a typo more than likely but the article doesn't actually say the 5TB model would be $85-95, it's comparing the 4TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD at $1499 with the 4TB model of this new BarraCuda drive at potentially $85-95 which again would be amazing but I have to wonder if they're getting the right figures.

The $85 is noted at the end of the Tom's Hardware article for the 2TB FireCude 2.5" model which is a hybrid HD/SSD model:

Seagate indicated the 2TB FireCuda will retail for $85-$95.
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So potentially we could see the 5TB model around $150-250-ish, more than likely - yes that's a wide range but I mean really, anybody that thinks Seagate is going to drop a shitload of storage in the 5TB range for under $100, get real. :D
 
Tiberian said:
There's just no possible way this could retail for $85 for a 5TB drive. The sheer amount of research and development to create such a drive would force the cost - of course we'd include the physical parts and manufacturing expenses into this as well - to be closer to $285 I'd say. It's got to be a typo more than likely but the article doesn't actually say the 5TB model would be $85-95, it's comparing the 4TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD at $1499 with the 4TB model of this new BarraCuda drive at potentially $85-95 which again would be amazing but I have to wonder if they're getting the right figures.

The $85 is noted at the end of the Tom's Hardware article for the 2TB FireCude 2.5" model which is a hybrid HD/SSD model:



So potentially we could see the 5TB model around $150-250-ish, more than likely - yes that's a wide range but I mean really, anybody that thinks Seagate is going to drop a shitload of storage in the 5TB range for under $100, get real. :D
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The Tom's article also has the Barracuda listed at the lower price. Check the "The Density Bits" section of the article.

the article said:
Seagate's move to high-density 2.5" products is essential as it attempts to stave off denser SSDs. The 2TB limit in the 2.5" 7mm form factor continues to be a sore spot, as Samsung already has 4TB SSDs with the same measurements. HDDs still enjoy a significant price advantage, however: A 4TB Samsung 850 EVO will set you back $1,499, whereas Seagate said the BarraCuda will retail for a mere $55-$85 depending on capacity. However, SSDs continue to steal more market share in the notebook segment every quarter. Seagate's focus on the external segment is wise as it continues to retreat into "cheap and deep" applications.
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I was thinking that pricing referred to bulk pricing, but it looks to be retail. I'm excited.
 
I wouldn't use a Seagate Drive even as a paperweight for fear they will crash and set my papers on fire.

I have not had a bad drive in almost 3 years..... which is when I stopped buying Seagate drives and threw 10 Seagate drives in the Trash because of bad sectors.

HGST for the Win
 
spydermonkey said:
The Tom's article also has the Barracuda listed at the lower price. Check the "The Density Bits" section of the article.



I was thinking that pricing referred to bulk pricing, but it looks to be retail. I'm excited.
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Put me down for 4 on launch day. That's insane, time for a mini-nas build.
 
MHzTweaker said:
I wouldn't use a Seagate Drive even as a paperweight for fear they will crash and set my papers on fire.

I have not had a bad drive in almost 3 years..... which is when I stopped buying Seagate drives and threw 10 Seagate drives in the Trash because of bad sectors.

HGST for the Win
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To be fair, only >= 7200.11 3.5"s seem problematic. 2.5"s are fine, < 7200.11 are fine.
HGST is the gold standard (the ancient 60GXP aside), and WD has been pretty good as well (other than perhaps their 6TBs, which seem funky).
 
Tiberian said:
There's just no possible way this could retail for $85 for a 5TB drive. The sheer amount of research and development to create such a drive would force the cost - of course we'd include the physical parts and manufacturing expenses into this as well - to be closer to $285 I'd say. It's got to be a typo more than likely but the article doesn't actually say the 5TB model would be $85-95, it's comparing the 4TB Samsung 850 EVO SSD at $1499 with the 4TB model of this new BarraCuda drive at potentially $85-95 which again would be amazing but I have to wonder if they're getting the right figures.

The $85 is noted at the end of the Tom's Hardware article for the 2TB FireCude 2.5" model which is a hybrid HD/SSD model:



So potentially we could see the 5TB model around $150-250-ish, more than likely - yes that's a wide range but I mean really, anybody that thinks Seagate is going to drop a shitload of storage in the 5TB range for under $100, get real. :D
Click to expand...

Yep, it'll be over $200 guaranteed. Span.com has a pre-order placeholder page listing it at $236 before VAT.
 
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As stated, probably wrong price, but at $85 for a 5TB drive? If thats the case, I would not care if they are Seagate, I would take a chance on them to add to my media server, its where I need the space at anyway and if a drive fails, oh well, I didn't lose anything that matters.
 
I'll believe the $85 when I see it.. and if that happens I'll be grabbing a few. I've been trying to replace my old Seagate 3TB 3.5" drives with HGST Coolspin 4TB drives when they go on sale at Fry's ($99), but those sales seem to have dried up over the last couple months and I still need 2 more for my array :( Moving to 2.5" drives and I can load them all up in a spare Dell R710 I have (8 drives) or even grab an HP DL380 G7 from work, a secondary drive enclosure off Ebay, and fill that up with 16 drives.
 
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