Our latest guide to the best hard drives for general consumption stays below 6TB because it seeks a good price-to-performance balance. But higher-capacity models have improved a lot, and the price gap is no longer absurd. Today we’ll take a quick look at two very interesting 12TB drives: Western Digital Gold and the Seagate Barracuda Pro Compute.
Anyone trying to install part of their Steam library knows that games are putting enormous pressure on our hard drives. The average install size for AAA titles ranges from 30 to 40GB, with several extreme cases comfortably exceeding 100GB. Add to that the impact of 4K video. Sooner or later, our favorite YouTubers talk about their storage solutions, based on NAS units or dedicated servers that accumulate dozens of terabytes. SSDs have exploded and prices are rock bottom, but when it comes to pure density, the traditional hard drive still reigns. The best part? The 10TB-per-unit limit is a thing of the past, and costs are not crazy. Examples?
12TB Hard Drives
Western Digital Gold, 12TB
From a technical standpoint, the Western Digital Gold has been specifically designed for RAID configurations, but nothing stops you from installing one of these beasts in your computer. Although it shares the SATA III 6 Gb/s interface, the 12TB Western Digital Gold has an advantage over its smaller siblings: it doubles its cache memory, from 128 to 256 MB. When measuring speed, the Western Digital Gold favors reads over writes in some benchmarks, though its overall average sits where we expected it, at around 250 MB/s read and write. The €578 price tag may worry some readers, but that translates to €48 per terabyte of enterprise-class storage, with a five-year warranty.
Seagate Barracuda Pro Compute, 12TB
Several of our resident readers are decidedly 'anti-Seagate', but we would be wrong not to recognize that the manufacturer has improved its aim. One piece of evidence is the 12TB Seagate Barracuda Pro Compute. This hard drive also has 256 MB of cache and a maximum transfer speed hovering near 250 MB/s, but Seagate clears up any doubts about the Barracuda Pro Compute's operation with a design prepared for 24x7 activity and a workload of 300 TB per year. On top of that, Seagate offers a five-year warranty (standard Barracuda drives only offer two), and a two-year Rescue data recovery plan. Its current price is €530, or €44 per terabyte.
(Editor's note: As of this writing, the 12TB model is not available, so we leave the 10TB model as an alternative. You can check the status of the 12TB version by clicking here.)
Beyond your personal preferences, the truth is that either of these 12TB hard drives should serve you well. However, don't lose sight of a fundamental truth: All hard drives fail or degrade, without exception. Your storage solutions are directly tied to the quality of your backup strategy. Discipline and redundancy. Good luck!
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