An SSD is the best and simplest way to speed up your PC, and Seagate wants to be the name inside your computer, with the new BarraCuda SSD line. Prices start at $74.99 for the 250GB version.

Now that SSDs are available from different companies and not just the usual names, Seagate decided to have its own consumer-oriented SSD, which will still live side by side with the FireCuda SSHD, a drive that melds NAND flash technology with a traditional hard drive for a compact blend of capacity and speeds up to 5× faster than typical hard drives. The Firecuda solution continues to be available, but with the price of SSDs coming down, the fastest and simplest way to upgrade a computer and optimize performance is through the use of a SSD.  A BarraCuda SSD 250GB drive which costs $74.99 will be enough for most people to install the OS and essential programs. Those who need more space can opt for the 500GB version, with a price of $119.99.

It’s true that HDDs continue to be cheaper, but the massive boost your entire system’s responsiveness gets from introducing a SSD justifies the investment. Having moved, recently, the OS and programs on one of my computers from a FireCuda hybrid, said to be 5x faster than a normal HDD, to a SSD, the gain in speed is evident. Time is money…

So, Seagate decided it was time to also offer SSDs for the consumer, besides their – few – enterprise solutions, along with their classic HDD and the FireCuda SSHD (which may be selling less these days). With capacities up to 12TB on the BarraCuda and IronWolf HDDs, there are enough solutions to satisfy the needs of different users, and the new SSD covers everything from 250GB to 2TB. Seagate’s BarraCuda SSDs are not available yet, and apparently will first be available through Amazon Prime, on Prime Day, July 16^th. The prices quoted here are for a special promotion for Prime clients, and there is no indication, yet of the price for the 2TB version. The 1TB costs, at Amazon, $229.99.

The introduction of the BarraCuda SSD comes as no surprise. Last month, when Seagate took to the E3, in Los Angeles, to show its new Game Drive for Xbox SSD – a flash-speed SSD storage drive designed exclusively for Xbox One – delivering fast gaming performance and convenient portability, I read the information available and asked myself when new internal SSD drives from Seagate would be available. It did not take long!

The SSD storage drive designed exclusively for Xbox One, available in 2TB, 1TB, and 500GB capacities was presented as “pro-level flash SSD upgrade” and Jeff Fochtman, vice president of marketing for Seagate Technology, said then that the Game Drive for Xbox SSD “offers gamers the extra capacity for their entire library and flash-speed performance so they can jump into their games without waiting on slow menus and load times.”

The new BarraCuda SSD follows the same logic, offering users a drive that provides maximum sequential read and write speeds reaching 540/520 MB/s, in line with current SSDs. With a MTBF (mean time between failures) rating of 1.8 million hours and delivering up to 1092TBW (terabytes written) the BarraCuda SSD comes with a 5 year warranty.

Seagate has not provided much information about the Barracuda SSD, just the page on the company’s website, the Amazon Prime promotion and one post published on Seagate’s blog with the title “What’s the Best Upgrade for Your Computer? The New BarraCuda SSD”.

It’s interesting to see Seagate joining the name of the companies offering consumer-oriented SSDs, a path that its rival Western Digital has made before. For consumers it is important, because the more players there are in the market, the lower the prices may go (if the price of memory allows it). But as we’ve suggested here, SSDs may have a new contender, the SD Express, which may also contribute to make SSDs even more accessible, when and if it reaches the market.