Upgrading My Plex Server With a new TerraMaster NAS and Seagate IronWolf Pro Drives!

Seagate Ironwolf Pro Hard Drives

When it comes to high-performance, durable and reliable hard drives, there are only really a couple of big names in the business, and for me, Seagate are right at the top. Their latest 20TB IronWolf Pro drives offer some truly staggering capacity while still maintaining the ever-long standing 3.5″ form factor.

The new drives use the more high-end helium-filled design, as it creates less resistance than air allowing for higher density platters and more of them to be packed into the drives. They’re amazing bits of kit, considering the first time I upgraded a hard drive in my first custom PC, it was a whopping 500MB SCSI drive and was the same form factor.

There’s IronWof and IronWolf Pro. They’re both offering the same capacities and performance. However, the IronWolf range is designed for everything NAS with a 180 TB/year workload, with capacities up to 12TB and is ideal for 1-8 bay configurations. While the IronWolf Pro is designed for everything business NAS and provides a workload rate of 300 TB/year, is available in up to 20TB capacities and is ideal for 1-24 bay configurations. So if you’re planning on really ragging your drives 24/7 for many users, the Pro versions are the better shout. If you’re just using it to backup your home network and run an in-home Plex server, the regular IronWolf will be fine, and a little cheaper. Beyond that, there are the Exos drives, but they’re pretty much just for enterprise solutions that are beyond what we’re doing here today.