Seagate BarraCuda Hard Drives

BarraCuda is the longest-running Seagate desktop hard drive line, and it is the single most common drive family in our catalogue. If you are replacing a disk in a desktop, a tower workstation or an older small-business machine, there is a good chance the original was a BarraCuda.

Generations

The classic BarraCuda drives are numbered by generation — 7200.7, 7200.9, 7200.10, 7200.11 and 7200.12 — with the number after the decimal marking successive design revisions rather than a speed difference. All run at 7200RPM. Later generations generally offer higher capacity per platter and larger cache.

BarraCuda ES

Alongside the desktop drives, Seagate produced BarraCuda ES and ES.2 as nearline models intended for continuous-duty use in servers and arrays. They share the BarraCuda name but were built for a different duty cycle, and some carry hot-swap support. If a drive is going into equipment that runs continuously, the ES models are the more suitable of the two.

What to check before ordering

• Interface generation — BarraCuda spans SATA 1.5Gb/s, 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s; all interoperate at the lower common rate
• Cache size — commonly 2MB, 8MB or 16MB on the older generations
• Form factor — the BarraCuda line here is 3.5-inch; for 2.5-inch Seagate drives see the Momentus models on our Seagate SATA page

Because these are widely produced drives with many near-identical variants, the full ST model number is the safest thing to order on. Send us the ST number from the existing drive if you want an exact match confirmed.