Seagate IronWolf

Hard drive capacities are bumping up ever so slowly. Although they are, by far, not the largest medium anymore, they are the cheapest with decent read/ write performance.

The Seagate IronWolf is Seagate’s entry-level NAS hard disk drive designed for consumer-level workloads in one- to eight-drive arrays. The secret sauce for IronWolf comes from two sensors that accurately measure, and counter, vibration.

Best-Fit Applications

Home/SOHO NAS Desktop Towers.
Desktop RAID and servers.
Backup and disaster recovery.

Compared to others First in its class, they are equipped with RV sensors on high capacity drives to maintain performance in multi-bay NAS enclosures. RV sensors on IronWolf Pro come standard, helping business and creative pros to have consistent performance for years to come.

Features and Specifications

As the IronWolf drive has been specially made for NAS devices. it comes with a number of features that you wouldn’t normally find in a standard internal hard drive. These features allow the IronWolf to perform reliably 24/7 with large amounts of data coming and going, all while keeping power consumption low.

It can be fitted in 1 to 8-bay NAS devices. As you’d expect of a NAS hard drive, the IronWolf is optimized for RAID, and comes with technology Seagate calls ‘AgileArray’, featuring rotational vibration sensors which reduce vibration in multi-drive NAS devices. Error recovery control – essential if you’re trusting the IronWolf drive with irreplaceable documents – and advanced power management to keep running costs low are also headline features.

Seagate states it can handle a workload of 180TB a year, which is quite a decent amount for small to medium sized businesses. If you’re thinking of using this drive in your NAS at home, then it’s unlikely you’ll be moving that much data to and from the IronWolf.

Other specifications include SATA 6GB/s interface, a max sustained data transfer rate of 210MB/s for the 10TB and 8TB drives (195MB/s for 6TB, 180MB/s for the 4TB, 3TB, 2TB and 1TB drives) and a spindle speed of 7200 RPM for the 10TB, 8TB and 6TB drives. (the other capacities make do with 5900RPM), and has 256MB of cache.