Seagate IronWolf Pro
Does your NAS deserve the upgrade?
While the normal Seagate IronWolf NAS drives are aimed at home or small business use, the Pro drives are for creative professionals, and lighter enterprise use.
The IronWolf range uses a SATA 6Gbps interface, has up to 256MB cache, and a 7,200rpm spindle speed. Aimed at those who work their drives harder, the Pro IronWolf is rated for 300TB of data written a year, versus 180TB for the normal version. The warranty is also bumped up to five years, from three, and the mean time between failures (MTBF) to 1.2 million hours, rather than 1 million. The Pro drive also includes two years coverage with a data recovery service, for extra peace of mind.
Theoretical performance only sees a mild bump for the Pro (especially for the smaller capacities) and in real-world NAS testing, we saw no significant difference as the speed is bottlenecked by the network. In PC-based sequential testing, the 10TB drive hit 173.5MB/s reads and 170.9MB/s writes, with random speeds at 0.78MB/s and 1.64MB/s, respectively.
The Pro drives are available in 2TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB and 10TB — all with rotational vibration sensors. The Pro drives also support up to 16-drive RAID sets, rather than eight for the standard model. Make sure to compare prices — the cost per TB improves the larger you go, and the price difference to the non-Pro model drops dramatically. For example, the 10TB IronWolf is 92% of the cost of the Pro, making for no brainer upgrade.
Verdict
High-end NAS-focused features with competitive pricing in the largest capacities.