KITGURU SHORTLISTS: THE BEST HARD DISK DRIVE OF 2026

The new flagship drive of Seagate's Exos drive family is the 20TB X20. Designed for use with hyperscale applications/cloud data centres, Seagate’s new drive delivers more capacity per rack while maintaining the same small footprint for a reduced overall total cost of ownership. The X20 is officially rated as up to 285MB/s for transfer rates. We could confirm this figure with the default CrystalDiskMark Sequential test (QD32 T1) with result figures of 293MB/s for reads and 289MB/s for writes.

The IronWolf Pro range has been built from the ground up as heavy-duty NAS drives offering workload rates of 300TB/year and 24x7 operation. To ensure that the drives can deliver this level of performance they feature technologies to combat the effects of being housed in very large, multi-disk NAS environments. These technologies include firmware that is RAID optimised as well as Seagate's AgileArray and IHM (IronWolf Health Management).

Another Seagate drive, the IronWolf Pro 14TB is great for NAS users due to its high capacity. It uses Seagate's AcuTrac Technology which allows the drive to still function properly even if it's being impacted from vibration from a neighbouring drive. The drive is also fitted with Rotational Vibration (RV) Sensors to reduce vibration in the multi-bay enclosures while Dual Plane Balance ensures the drive is vibration-free and quiet during operation.

Aimed at the enterprise market segment, the WD Gold performs well, and has a specially designed Dynamic Fly Height system to ensure consistent, reliable performance. The 12TB Gold drive is power efficient and performs the neat trick of using less power through every stage of its use than the 6TB Gold model. Average power requirements for the Sequential Read/Writes is 7W and 6.8W respectively, for the 6TB model it's 9.3W and 8.9W respectively.

Aimed specifically at desktop users, Seagate's Barracuda Pro 12TB offers masses of space and a drive that can read and write at a sustained 250MB/s. It's got another 5-year warranty, too, making this a great option if you need a lot of storage space.