Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB NAS HDD Review

Introduction

Seagate launched the Guardian series of drives last year and we’ve already seen both the IronWolf 10TB and the SkyHawk 10TB drives perform awesome in our reviews. Today it is time to take a look at the IronWolf Pro 10TB drive which is the latest entry in this family of large-capacity storage drives. The drives that we previously tested were aimed at-home-use and now we are stepping up to the small and medium businesses with this new Pro drives.

The IronWolf Pro is built to help small to midsized enterprises better manage the massive amounts of data they create and consume as the IronWolf Pro comes with an impressive workload rating of up to 300TB a year. That is a lot of data. Where the consumer drives are designed for use in systems with up to 8 drive bays, the Pro steps that up to double: 16 drive bays. That is up to 160TB raw capacity in a single NAS or server.

“An extension of Seagate’s Guardian Series of 10TB hard drives launched in July, the IronWolf Pro gives businesses greater durability and agility to run their heaviest workloads in large, multi-user NAS environments,” said Jeff Fochtman, vice president of global marketing at Seagate. “With the added peace of mind of Seagate Rescue, businesses can know their data is safe.”

Pure capacity is one thing, but it isn’t all. Especially when it comes to enterprises who rely on stability and reliability. That is where the firmware and other technologies come into play. The core for this drive is called AgileArray and it is what makes it great. This includes a NAS-optimised performance for the best-possible user experience as well as health management to safeguard the health of your data (Synology NAS only for now).

One of the reasons that you don’t want to run ordinary desktop drives in NAS setups with a lot of drives, besides the workload rating, is the vibration issue. Mechanical drives spin the internal platters quite fast and that will create vibrations and so do other parts such as the cooling fans in the systems. This can have an impact on the performance and it can even damage the drives in a worst case scenario. To combat this, the IronWolf drives feature Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors which manage multi-bay vibration for long-term consistent performance and reliability.

Naturally, the IronWolf Pro are optimised for the best RAID performance and built to maximise responsiveness and uptime with NAS-aware Error Recovery Control. The drives also feature advanced power management which saves energy and delivers the right power at the right time. A great power management will really show the more drives you employ in your setup and these drives are designed to be run in such environments.

Seagate is also working closely with the big NAS manufacturers on the market to not only guarantee a great performance in these systems and also to bring unique solutions to their customers. One of the first in this regard is the IronWolf Health Management that I shortly mentioned above. Users with Synology DiskStations running DSM 6.1 or higher can enjoy the benefits of the Workload-aware monitoring. This provides peace of mind with notifications on drive health and intelligent analysis which provides environmental and operational recommendations. The IronWolf drives are automatically detected within these systems and you don’t need any additional setup – but the system is still in beta stage at the time of this review.

Another difference between desktop and NAS drives is that NAS drives are optimised for use by multiple users rather than just one. This enables the IronWolf Pro to come out with an impressive 300TB a year workload rating. That’s not just impressive in relation to desktop drives, it is equally impressive towards the normal IronWolf drive which already has a nice rating with its 180TB a year rating. With such ratings, multiple users can confidently upload and download data to a NAS server. Whether the users are creative professionals or a small business, the IronWolf Pro will serve faithfully.

A really awesome bonus for any IronWolf Pro owner is that the drives come with an included 2-year Rescue Data Recovery service. In most cases, the data stored on drives such as these are vital and even the best backup solutions can fail. The Rescue Data Recovery service provides and extra peace of mind in case of unexpected data loss due to accidents or mechanical damage of your drives. Wit this, you get access to a global team of world-class data recovery experts with a 95% customer satisfaction rating. The only thing required to take advantage of this is that you register the drive one you have purchased it and you are covered for two years. This can be extended for a fee should you require or want a longer protection.

For ease, you can compare the two IronWolf drive types below and also compare it to the full enterprise class drives. The IronWolf Pro lands nicely in the middle with great specifications and ratings that should satisfy most.

Feature Highlights

• 1- to 16-bay business network attached storage
• Optimised for NAS with AgileArray
• Seagate Rescue Data Recovery
• Rotational Vibration (RV) mitigation
• Range of capacities up to 10 TB
• Do more with multi-user technology
• Designed for always on, always accessible 24×7 performance
• 1.2M hours MTBF, 5-year limited warranty

Specifications

Packaging

As an OEM drive, it only came packed securely in an anti-static bag. As such, there isn’t much to show in this part of the review.

Test Procedure & Specifications

Testing a mechanical hard drive’s performance is pretty straightforward and there isn’t much to say tell in this section. I will be testing the drive that in this case is the Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB NAS hard disk drive in a wide a variety of applications to gather as many tests results as possible.

I’m covering the basis with Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD, ATTO, and CDM where I’ll be doing fillage analysis in four steps: 0%, 25%, 50%, and 75% capacity usage. On top of these more generic tests, I’ll be running the full AIDA64 Storage Benchmark tests with Linear, Random, and Access Time in both read and write-based tests. This is then followed by the real-world app testing through PCMark 8’s Storage Benchmark. To top it off, I’m testing the drive in a 20minute test each for sequential read and write as well as random read and write with IOmeter set up with 4 workers.

In return, it will hopefully allow you to find just the right comparison so you are well equipped with the knowledge you need when you decide what you next storage drive should be.

Test system:

• Gigabyte Z79X UD5H-BK
• Intel Core i7-4790K
• G.Skill Ares DDR3 1866MHz (2x4GB)
• OCZ Vertex4 256GB
• CoolerMaster Silent Pro Hybrid 850W
• NZXT Kraken X60
• Dimastech Easy V3

Software used:

• AIDA64 Storage Benchmark
• Anvil’s Storage Utilities
• AS SSD Benchmark
• ATTO Benchmark
• CrystalDiskMark
• IOMeter
• PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark
• Windows 10 Pro

AIDA64 Engineer

AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring.

It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one we’ll be using.

Linear Performance

The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view on the drives overall performance from start to end.

Random Performance

The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation.

Access Times

The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface.

Drive Comparison

Anvil’s Storage Utilities

Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a relative new benchmarking utility that has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. It is completely free as well, which is a nice thing

Compressible Data

Incompressible Data

Drive Analysis

The drive-analysis shows the drive’s performance over various fillage scenarios. The straighter the line, the better the result. We really want a consistent performance across the entire drive.

Drive Comparison

For comparison reasons, the drive comparison chart will use values from the fresh and empty drive.

AS SSD

The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I’ve chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view

To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I’ve chosen to include all tests, also the copy test. While it isn’t the most static test, I think it is a relevant test in the eyes of consumers, giving them a view into one of the operations they’re going to be doing many times.

Compression

Drive Analysis

The drive-analysis shows the drive’s performance over various fillage scenarios. The straighter the line, the better the result. We really want a consistent performance across the entire drive.

Drive Comparison

For comparison reasons, the drive comparison chart will use values from the fresh and empty drive.

ATTO

The ATTO Disk Benchmark is a performance measurement tool is for Windows. It measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for both reads and writes. It has multiple options available to customise your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.

ATTO can be used to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives so it is a popular tool everywhere.

Drive Analysis

The drive-analysis shows the drive’s performance over various fillage scenarios. The straighter the line, the better the result. We really want a consistent performance across the entire drive.

Drive Comparison

For comparison reasons, the drive comparison chart will use values from the fresh and empty drive.

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds.

Drive Analysis

The drive-analysis shows the drive’s performance over various fillage scenarios. The straighter the line, the better the result. We really want a consistent performance across the entire drive.

Drive Comparison

For comparison reasons, the drive comparison chart will use values from the fresh and empty drive.

PCMark 8

PCMark 8 Storage benchmark is used test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices.

Drive Comparison

IOmeter

IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS.

Where most benchmarks show an average value, our IOmeter tests are a little different and show us the final result after a 20 minute continuously running test.

Sequential Performance

Random Performance

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, the Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB can be yours for $479.99 at Amazon US and £451.91 at Amazon UK. A fair price for an amazing drive.

Conclusion

Seagate has truly shown us great things with their Guardian series. I’ve reviewed two other drives in the series previously, which both did great, so I had high hopes for this IronWolf Pro drive too. And I wasn’t disappointed one bit. The drive performs great, especially when it comes to the write performance.

A mechanical drive will naturally get a little slower as it fills up, simply because the mechanical parts have to move further from the start position. That’s basic physics. That said, we got a great performance throughout all our tests, even if not the best read scores at all times. In return, we saw a really great random write performance that is miles ahead of anything else that I’ve tested in this category earlier. This goes to show, that you need to pick the right drive for the job it has to perform and that’s one of the reasons that we test so many different drives here at eTeknix; to help you make up your mind on which is the right drive for you.

The IronWolf Pro comes with the AgileArray technology and that is a big part of why the drive performs so great. It also features rotational vibration mitigation through RV sensors to maintain high performance in multi-bay enclosures up to 16 bays. That is a lot of capacity when we’re already dealing with 10TB drives. It’s just a few years ago that 2TB was the maximum drive size and now we’re dealing with five times that – and better speeds too. What a time to be alive in!

The IronWolf Pro series also comes with two years included Rescue Data Recovery which is a great extra safety to have for your data, just in case the worst-case scenario should happen and a drive fails either due to an accident or mechanical failure. Seagate has an impressive recovery rate of data in this regard and that’s a vital bonus for many businesses.

Overall, simply a great drive that has it all. Capacity, performance, and endurance as well as disaster recovery. I wouldn’t hesitate to use this drive in any of my storage setups.

Pros

• Good performance
• Huge capacity
• Supports up to 16 drive-bay setups
• 300TB/year workload rating and 1.2 million hours MTBF
• 5-year warranty and 2-year Rescue Data Recovery with every drive

Cons

• None

“If you need a lot of capacity, performance, and can afford it, get the IronWolf Pro 10TB drive. It’s that simple!”

Thank you Seagate for providing us with this sample