Seagate Re-enters Consumer SSD Market With BarraCuda

Seagate Release Successor SSD to the 600

As one of the two hard disk drive giants, Seagate has a huge presence in storage. On top of their HDD business, the company has a strong presence in the SSD market. However, those drives have been restricted to the enterprise save a few short experiments in 2013. 5 years later, it looks like Seagate is ready to try again in earnest. The company is releasing their new BarraCuda SSD aimed squarely at consumers.

Leveraging the Barracuda brand, the company is aiming the BarraCuda SSD squarely at the mass market. For now Seagate is light on the technical specifications but it appears to be 64L 3D TLC NAND. This is about standard for mainstream drives for price-conscious buyers. The drives come in at $74.99 for the 250GB, $119.99 for 500GB and $229.99 for 1TB. We can expect lower prices once the drives hit the market based on competition.

Seagate Return to Consumer Marks Shift in Strategy

The real key is whether or not Seagate has done extra legwork in the background. With turnkey solutions, any firm can churn out an SMI SSD. This may well mean that the firm is really just releasing an SSD to synergize with their HDD storage brand. On the other hand, the company could have developed custom hardware or tweaked the controller with a special configuration. That would offer something more special for the market. This will take more testing to see what is the case.

Since the Seagate 600 debuted in 2013, the company has been quiet on the consumer front. The exception is the Nytro launched last year. However, with the growth in SSDs, the consumer market cannot be ignored any longer. Without a firm source of NAND as WD and Samsung have, Seagate is in a tougher spot. However, now that they are a shareholder in Toshiba Memory, they may find more traction. It will be interesting to see what investments the company will continue to make for consumer SSDs. Drives are available on Amazon later this month, with more availability later in September.