Massive 24TB Storage For Your PC
If you have been running out of space for your games, recordings, and media, a giant hard drive like Seagate’s 24TB BarraCuda can be a game changer. This drive offers a huge amount of storage in a single 3.5 inch desktop drive, making it ideal for gaming rigs, home servers, or creators who work with large video and project files.
The BarraCuda line is Seagate’s mainstream desktop hard drive family, designed for everyday PCs and gaming systems. With 24TB of capacity, you can store thousands of games, 4K videos, and backups without constantly managing what to delete.
This specific model is a 7200 RPM drive, which is the faster spinning speed commonly used in performance oriented desktop hard drives. While it is not as fast as an NVMe SSD for loading times, it offers much better price per terabyte and is excellent for bulk storage.
Why A 24TB Hard Drive Matters For Gamers And PC Users
Modern PC gaming has pushed storage needs to a new level. Many AAA games are now 100GB or larger, and frequent updates can quickly grow install sizes. If you record gameplay, stream, or store media, storage fills up even faster.
Here is how a 24TB drive can help:
- Game library storage Keep your entire Steam or Game Pass library installed without constantly uninstalling older titles.
- Media and content creation Store years of 4K gameplay captures, YouTube footage, and project files in one place.
- Backup and safety Use the drive as a backup target for your main SSDs, protecting saves, mods, and important documents.
- Home server or NAS Build a home media server or a simple NAS style setup for your network and stream content to multiple devices.
Compared to multiple smaller drives, a single 24TB drive can simplify cable management and power usage. Fewer drives means fewer SATA cables, fewer power connectors, and often a cleaner build.
Performance And Best Use Cases
The Seagate BarraCuda 24TB is a 7200 RPM hard drive. That rotation speed helps it deliver better performance than slower 5400 RPM drives, especially for large file transfers. Here is what it is best for and how it fits into a modern PC build.
- Great for bulk storage Large games, media libraries, backups, and archives.
- Okay for secondary game installs You can run games from it, but they will not load as fast as from an SSD.
- Not a primary OS drive You should still use an NVMe or SATA SSD for your operating system and your most played games.
The ideal setup for many gamers and power users is a hybrid storage layout:
- Primary NVMe SSD A 1TB or 2TB NVMe drive for Windows, core apps, and your main competitive or regularly played games.
- Secondary large HDD like this 24TB BarraCuda For everything else. Game archives, single player titles you rotate through, and all your media and project files.
This combination lets you enjoy the speed of SSDs where it matters most while taking advantage of the low cost per terabyte that traditional hard drives still offer.
Even though HDDs cannot match SSDs in random access times, a 7200 RPM drive is still very usable for many workloads. Long Steam downloads, large file transfers, and media playback are all tasks where a high capacity drive like this excels.
Who Should Consider This 24TB Deal
A 24TB drive is not necessary for every build, but it is extremely appealing for certain users.
- PC gamers with large libraries If you are tired of uninstalling games to make room for new ones, this drive gives you room to breathe.
- Content creators Streamers and video editors who capture a lot of gameplay will appreciate the space for raw footage and export files.
- Home lab and NAS enthusiasts It can serve as a big single drive in a home server or as part of a larger array.
- Backup focused users If you want image backups of multiple PCs or large collections of photos and videos, 24TB goes a long way.
When choosing any high capacity drive, also think about backup strategies. A single 24TB drive holds a lot of data, and no drive is immune to failure. Pair it with a cloud backup or another external drive for truly important files.
In the current storage landscape, large HDDs like this Seagate BarraCuda remain one of the best values for sheer capacity. While SSD prices have fallen, matching 24TB with solid state storage is still extremely expensive for most people. Using a mix of SSD for speed and HDD for bulk is still the sweet spot for PC gaming and productivity builds.
Original article and image: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/seagates-24tb-barracuda-is-back-in-stock-for-just-usd0-01-per-gigabyte-the-storage-steal-of-the-weekend-returns-still-great-value
