Review: Seagate Barracuda Pro 14TB HDD (the Megalodon has arrived)

Obviously tech pushes forward, and more capacity is better for anyone that needs it.

However price / GB is not yet Ok for these 14 Tera-drives.
You can get more capacity per money spent by buying 2x 8TB than 1x 14TB, as those two 8TB drives are cheaper than 1x 14TB.

However, when absolute max capacity is needed for a limited amount of drives (let's say a 4-bay NAS), this new capacity level is awesome !

 

My largest HDD is 2TB. Not using it, really. I can't even remember how long I have it.

Back in the day, I backed up every game I had, every DVD, ...

But since 40GB+ movies and games came along, I considered it waste of space. It's not like in case there is no more internet to re-download my games, I would be in position to sit at home and play games from backup.

 

2*14TB in my case would be just sufficient,as currently have 6*3TB and 1*4TB plus 3*1TB SSD just what puts me off is price, sadly

Then failure rate of Seagate HDD, owned 3*3TB Barracuda and all of them failed, recovering them would be too expensive and I didn't recover them, lost several months of rendering plus my other works

But still nice to see 14TB HDD review and test over here

Hope this helps

Thanks, Jura

 

So roughly 14,5 hours to fill it up at max speed?

 

Question: How is it possible that this drive doesn't seem to slow down towards the end ?

The HD Tach show SSD-like speed consistency, and that is very unusual.
Either there is some strange caching involved, or the drive itself is "mapping" addresses like a SSD, always writing and reading first from the outer tracks.

@Hilbert Hagedoorn
It would be interesting if you could fill this drive completely (all the 14 TB) with random data, and test read speeds then.
Constant 240-250 MB/s on the entire drive is NOT normal.

 

I just worked out, if this was available at the same £ per MB when I bought my first hard drive. It would have cost £17,500,000

Holy crap.

 

Check red graph in Sandra test Slowing down at the end as expected.

 

I'm not sure I'd trust a single drive with that much capacity.
1 failure and you've lost 14 TB worth of data. Or whatever fraction of it you've managed to fill.

 

Well it does

 

I am interested to see how ST2000DM008 can perform,it's single 2TB platter HDD with 220MBS, interested to see how it can used for Steam library, My current WD EZEX 1TB is very slow for Rainbow Six Siege and all calling me a potato PC even tho I got 2700X/120GB SSD/1080TI/200MBs Fiber.

 

Surprisingly good performance for a singe drive.

I'm not sure I would entirely agree. Keep in mind that people running drives like this are probably going to RAID1/5/10 them. If data integrity matters to you, spending a little bit extra so you have fewer drives to make redundant is a better long-term approach. Every additional moving part you add is one more thing creating heat, noise, and an increased chance of failure.

That's not to say your idea is a bad one, but for some people, the extra expense is a practical one.

 

14tb + Seagate sends shivers up my spine.

 

Thanks !
Now it's much more clear how fast (or not fast) these are.

With hard-drives, it's important to know that their speed isn't consistent, the more full the drive is the slower it becomes, due to inner tracks being shorter than outer tracks ( Track length = 2 * PI * Radius . Spinning speed is constant and bit density is also constant, while radius decreases as the drive gets filled.

SSD's on the other hand do not depend on geometry so they keep their speed completely ignoring the position of the data.

And then there's fragmentation... which causes files to be spread all over the drive, forcing the heads to move a lot when accessing a fragmented drive, making a slow hard-disk feel even slower ...

 

Great review as always Hilbert. That's a lot of TB to fill , it seems HDs are going to be with us for a few more years.

 

At this platter density, we should be seeing 400+ MB/s reads

 

Great drive forward with hard drive capacities etc (no pun intended).

Ideal to replace multiple NAS setups with less and higher based capacity drives.