And with the introduction of those massive HDD’s for consumers, Seagate has also revamped their product-lines to be quite a bit easier to understand. What they did is officially bring back the Barracuda name and institute new names for the different lines of drives that have different target markets.
Seagate intros up to 10TB in their new Guardian series
They’ve split up the different categories into BarraCuda, a name revived for consumers once again, Firecuda to indicate SSHD, or Hybrid, drives, Ironwolf for NAS storage and Skyhawk for specific surveillance needs. The drives themselves are the same, though they’re now adding a 10TB option for everyone and at a less expensive price. The BarraCuda line, which is for the average everyday consumer, is further split up into normal BarraCuda Pro, which includes those higher capacities.
Seagate is trying to revitalize their image by changing things enough to help boost customer confidence. There was once a time when the Barracuda name was synonymous with quality, reliability and performance. They’ve stumbled recently with a higher than normal failure rates and have lost some precious market share as a result. Seagate has done a lot of work to improve their manufacturing and make sure their drives are just as reliable as ever. The problems is that there might be a latent negative association that needs to be changed. A re-branding such as this should have a positive effect. We recently reviewed the 4TB SSHD to see how fast it actually is, and happened to come away quite impressed. The future looks good, though a re-brand is never a true guarantee of a change of consumers hearts. Thankfully, though, they still have quite the enterprise and data-center presence.
You can find the top-end BarraCuda Pro 10TB for around $508.99. Not terrible considering the massive amount of music, movies and TV shows you can store on one alone.