Seagate BarraCuda are legendary hard drives that once stood in every third PC and have experienced more than one wave of rebranding and ideological rethinking. All representatives of this family are made in the classic 3.5” format and are designed for installation inside a computer case. Almost all of them are equipped with a read head designed to operate at a speed of 7200 rpm. Much less often on sale there are options with a slower spindle (5900 or 5600 rpm). Depending on the amount of internal storage, the amount of cache memory can range from 32 to 256 MB.


With the industry-leading backwards-compatible SATA3 port, BarraCuda drives are suitable for installation in both modern workstations and older office or gaming PCs that don't require instant responsiveness. Due to the high quality control, all members of this family can boast an extended 5-year warranty, although most entry-level hard drives are usually limited to 3 years of warranty service.

At the time of this writing (note: spring 2022), the BarraCuda series is based on conventional BarraCuda hard drives and their improved BarraCuda Pro counterparts. The undeniable advantage of Pro-drives is increased time to failure, extended warranty period, higher linear data transfer rate and larger maximum capacity. If a regular BarraCuda hard drive goes on sale with storage from 500 GB to 8 TB, hard drives with the Pro prefix often boast storage from 8 to 12 TB.