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There’s something about 12TB hard drives reading and writing at 250MBps that we just can’t get enough of. This go-round, we review Seagate’sIronWolf–the slightly slower, slightly lower-rent cousin to the mighty 12GB Seagate BarraCuda Prowe recently took for a spin. Game of Thronesmoniker aside, the IronWolf is still easily fast and enough, and should be reliable enough to make sense in the multi-drive setups for which it’s intended. We’ve written up comprehensive guides on Western Digital Red, Red Plus, and Red Pro as well as Seagate IronWolf vs. IronWolf Pro. These should aid you in better understanding the differences between the family of drives. 1. Seagate Ironwolf Pro: Best overall NAS hard drive Seagate IronWolf Pro. (Source: Seagate)
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We didn’t test the lower-capacity 1TB through 10TB IronWolf drives, but Seagate’s performance claims decrease progressively with each drop in capacity. On the other hand, the company lists only 210MBps for the 12TB model we tested, not the 250MBps we saw. You might see better-than-claimed performance with the other capacities as well, depending on your computer. Seagate
Where things differ slightly are speed, price, and capacities. Starting things off with the 2TB Western Digital Red Pro that can hit speeds up to 164MB/s. It offers among the worst value here with this family of drives. Then there’s the mighty 22TB variant. Buying the right 3.5-inch drive for your NAS is crucial since you’re going to rely on it to safely store all your data. You can’t simply use any old drive off the shelf, which is why we’ve compiled a list of only the best NAS hard drives for use inside enclosures. The IronWolf 12TB was only slightly slower than its Barracuda cousin in our copy tests. The ES.2 shows the kind of slow sustained performance many users are used to. The Western Digital Red Plus series of NAS drives are specially designed for server use. They’re better than the base Red range by using a better and more reliable way of storing data. This does mean they won’t be the absolute cheapest NAS drives from WD.
Seagate IronWolf 12TB review: A hard drive made for NAS that
they’re not quite as fast as Seagate IronWolf Pro drives, nor will you be able to use them in a configuration of more than eight drives, but they’ll be perfect for home and office use. A three-year warranty and 180TB per year workload rating shows just how capable these drives are. Our thoughts: Whilst you may not be able to match the specs of lesser capacity drives from Seagate, Western Digital does have the upper hand in terms of value and capacity. You can even buy a 22TB Red Pro drive for the ultimate storage machine. The Seagate IronWolf Pro range of NAS hard drives offers capacities between 4TB and 20TB. They are capable of being installed in a configuration of up to 24 bays. With a workload rate of 300TB per year and a warranty of five years, you’ll be able to rely on them for long-term storage of data. Please note that the 1TB through 4TB IronWolf drives spin at 5,900 rpm rather than the 7,200 that the larger capacity drives spin at. And only the 4TB drives and above sense and compensate the head assembly for vibrational factors. Also, the 4TB and larger drives feature Seagate’s IHM (IronWolf Health Management), which interfaces with NAS boxes from Synology, Thecus, and AsusStor (with more vendors on the way) to provide extensive monitoring of the IronWolf’s vital signs. the 1TB and 2TB models do not.Western Digital’s Red Pro series of NAS hard drives are designed for more serious storage requirements. They offer the same 300TB per year workload rating as Seagate IronWolf Pro drives, can work with up to 24 bays, and also come with a long-lasting five-year warranty. We tested the IronWolf 12TB using both the AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark synthetic benchmarks. To verify the results, we followed up with real-world copying of a single large 20GB file and a 20GB mix of smaller files and folders to and from the platters. We’d always recommend against using normal hard drives inside a NAS because they’re not designed for continuous use and don’t come with some of the features specially designed for servers. Seagate, Western Digital, Toshiba, and other brands have a collection of NAS-focused hard drives. The unit draws 7.8 watts—a relatively small amount of juice for a hard drive. For some reason, the 8TB version draws another watt, while the 10TB draws the same, and the 4TB and 6TB versions draw less. Seagate
IronWolf vs IronWolf Pro: What Are the Differences Between IronWolf vs IronWolf Pro: What Are the Differences Between
We’ll be using the IronWolf daily for the near future and we’ll let you know if there are any problems, or not. We don’t expect any. Performance As far as CrystalDiskMark 5 is concerned, the IronWolf and BarraCuda Pro might as well be the same drive. There wasn’t a lot to choose from in our 20GB copy tests, with the IronWolf reading and writing a tad slower than the BarraCuda Pro. Of course, it still blows away the vintage Seagate ES.2 1TB, which offers performance more in line with what the average user is accustomed to. IDG
Important metrics to consider when shopping around include price per GB to maximize your spending, transfer speed, motor speed, maximum bay support, cache, and workload. But really, for a home NAS, you’ll be absolutely fine with the cheapest NAS hard drive. For those who want to move up from Pro NAS drives, Seagate’s Exos range of storage will be just what you’re looking for. Some Pro drives will make use of helium, but all Seagate Exos drives are filled with the gas, which improves overall performance and reliability. The IronWolf’s write performance in AS SSD was 40MBps slower than the BarraCuda 10TB, but we’re still trying to understand the BarraCuda 12TB’s sudden drop in write speed. Take these numbers with a grain of salt. Our thoughts: We’re recommending the Seagate IronWolf Pro, not because it’s outright better than the Western Digital Red Pro, but because the drive with the least capacity has better specs. This makes it great to get into the pro range of drives without spending too much. The base Seagate IronWolf series of hard drives are available with capacities ranging between 1TB and 18TB. These are the hard drives you should buy over traditional consumer desktop drivers you’d typically use inside a PC.
Seagate IronWolf, 12TB, NAS, Internal Hard Drive, CMR, 3.5
While we’re talking about mechanical drives here, these things aren’t necessarily slow (aside from when compared to an SSD). The 4TB Seagate IronWolf Pro is capable of hitting up to 214MB/s, which is enough to saturate the two 1Gb network connections frequently found on prebuilt NAS enclosures. Note that we did not spot any statistically relevant difference in the seek times between the BarraCuda Pro and the IronWolf. Capacity caveats
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