Seagate IronWolf 12TB
Who’s afraid of the big, bad IronWolf?
These days, storage is all about solid state. SSDs provide not only the fastest performance, they also offer the largest capacities — for a price. But if you want maximum storage density for the minimum possible price, then you’ll need an old-school magnetic hard drive.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise to find that conventional hard drive technology marches on despite its relegation to a relatively small niche. A little over a year ago, the biggest mainstream hard drives weighed in at 10TB. Now we’re reviewing our first 12TB drive, the Seagate IronWolf.
It’s closely related to the Seagate Barracuda Pro, but further optimised for NAS applications. In other words, if you’ve got a NAS box that’s set for a drive upgrade, the IronWolf would like to offer its services. Indeed, Seagate offers two versions of the IronWolf: vanilla and Pro. This vanilla drive is aimed at connected homes, SOHO, and SMB apps, while the Pro is for full-on commercial and enterprise users. Both are packed with features, such as Seagate’s AgileArray tech, which involves RAID optimisation, dual-plane balancing and advanced power management. Then there’s Rotational Vibration (RV) mitigation, including several RV sensors that help maintain performance in multi-drive NAS enclosures that can transmit significant vibrations.
In 12TB trim, the IronWolf sports a total of eight platters, thus 1.5TB per platter. As a consequence, its 3.5-inch chassis is crammed. The usual recesses on the bottom of the drive are nowhere to be seen. Rounding the main feature set out is the 7,200rpm spindle speed and a chunky 256MB of cache, all running through a standard SATA 6Gb/s interface. Overall, this 12TB model is rated at 180TB per year of data traffic, has an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1 million hours, and a 3-year limited warranty.
For context, the IronWolf Pro is optimised for 300TB per year, has an MTBF of 1.2 million hours, and a 5-year warranty. In reality, there’s probably little in it in terms of the hardware. What we’re looking at is one hell of a lot of storage for a pretty reasonable price.
Granted, a 3TB or 4TB drive may offer marginally more storage per dollar, but the 12TB IronWolf is pretty competitive in that regard, and offers unbeatable data density. You could, for instance, swap out all the 3TB drives from a quaddrive NAS enclosure for just one of these puppies, and then add further drives when needed or wanted.
So the IronWolf looks good on paper and offers a pleasing capacity-to-dollar ratio. But how does it perform? By the standards of a conventional magnetic drive, it’s seriously swift. You’re looking at sequential reads and writes in the 260–270MB/s region. The 4K random access performance is where magnetic tech really shows its age, compared to solid-state storage. 4K reads of around 1MB/s and writes just under 3MB/s would be utterly catastrophic for an SSD; but for this type of drive, they’re very much competitive.
The bottom line is that you’re not going to get anywhere like the performance of even a budget SSD. But that was a given. If you want major storage density at a reasonable price, however, the IronWolf achieves that, and throws in excellent performance for this type of drive.