Since 2001, the Barracuda is Seagate's most popular product line as the hard disk drive industry started to move to a 7200 RPM spindle speed.

In 1992, Seagate introduced the first ever 7200-RPM spindle speed hard drive, the Barracuda 1, sold in capacity of 1.7 GB with a size of 3.5 inches.

[3] On November 13, 2000, Seagate launched the Barracuda 180 series,[5] it had the world's highest capacity for hard drives at the time, with 181 GB.

[6] On December 2, 2002, Seagate began shipping the first ever Serial ATA hard drive, the Barracuda 7200.7 series.

[7] On March 24, 2003, Seagate made their Serial ATA hard drives available for retail consumers.

The FAST SCSI-2 interface of the N/ND model drives targeted them to servers and high-performance systems, with a 10 MB/s transfer speed.

The drives came with a 5 year warranty, 500,000 hour Mean Time Between Failures rating, and a 4.17 msec latency.

[10] The third generation Barracuda drive announced October 18th, 1993, with a expected release in the following year.

The drive has a 26–47 MB/s transfer speed with the Ultra160 SCSI interface, and an average access time of 12.1 ms with 4 MB of on-board cache.

[12] Later Seagate replaced the base models with the ST1181677LWV and ST1181677LCV, they had 16 MB of on-board cache versus 4, and were hot-swappable if they had the right cable connection, but were otherwise the same.

[23] The SATA models have many problems, including random data loss (such as disappearing partitions).

A budget version of Barracuda 7200.7, marketed as U Series 9, with 1 MB of cache[28] and different actuator mechanism,[29] became available exclusively to OEMs in early 2003.

This is the only generation of Barracuda to feature 750 GB as the greatest in storage limit of IDE drive ever made by any manufacturer.

The ES (Enterprise Storage) family were high-reliability drives based on Barracuda 7200.10 design.

The access LED remains permanently on, despite being disconnected from USB and no longer being recognized by the computer.

The successor of ES.2, launched in early 2013,[52] is branded as "Constellation ES.3" which is based on the design of 14th-generation Barracuda.

Power consumption is reduced from previous models, resulting in lower heat dissipation and claimed reliability improvements.

Only SATA 3 Gbit/s models were available under Maxtor brand and was the last generation of DiamondMax drives produced.

Seagate phased out Maxtor brand in October 2009, reviving it in 2016, except for internal HDDs.

Barracuda XT is intended for high-performance gaming computers and workstations with sustained data transfer rate of 149 MB/s.

LP is designated for mass storage applications favoring low heat output, quiet operation and better-than-average energy efficiency.

Barracuda XT used re-engineered mechanical design, which featured, for the first time in desktop hard drives from Seagate, a head unload ramp, a feature shared with Western Digital, Toshiba, and HGST drives at the time that keeps the heads from ever having to touch the platters and drastically improving the rated start/stop cycle count.

[58] The most commonly referred issue with the Barracuda LP series drives appears to be one variation or another of the infamous click of death problem; the drive will start to emit a regular clicking noise at some point in its early life (possibly even at first start) and after some time will fail altogether, often after a few months of use.

While the clicking noise is emitted, the hard drive is inaccessible and may prevent the BIOS from detecting it.

One model in particular, ST3000DM001, is notable for its high failure rate,[60] frequently experiencing bad sector growth and head crashes.

They performed slightly worse due to same areal density and lower rpm compared to the barracuda.14 series.

[61] Currently listed BarraCuda drives mostly use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology to write data onto platters, and spin up at 5400 RPM (exception is model ST2000DM008, which spins up at 7200 RPM while utilizing SMR technology).

[61] This series has higher read/write performance than standard BarraCuda drives; one PCWorld review noted its consistent read speed throughout its entire capacity, which is unusual for a conventional HDD.

All models spin up at 7200 RPM, have 512 bytes per sector and write data onto platter using perpendicular magnetic recording technology.

The 500gb BarraCuda drives are likely discontinued as of late 2024 due to declining demand for lower capacity hdds.