Seagate Ironwolf Pro 10TB HDD Quick Review

Seagate is differentiating the capabilities of its storage devices by focusing on specific features that benefits or maximizes certain capabilities. Some are workhorse while others are for endurance. We can categorize the Seagate Ironwolf Pro in the latter.

At the moment, these 10TB HDDs from Seagate are the highest rated drives in terms of capacity but they also offer more than just your typical HDD. We’ve already tried out the regular 10TB Seagate Ironwolf a couple months back so let’s compare the two and identify the differences before we proceed.

The Seagate Ironwolf class is optimized for NAS (network-attached storage) use and the IronWolf Pro is the top of the line. Right off the bat, we can clearly see why the IronWolf Pro is the recommended choice if you run an enterprise-class network storage.

First is the support for more drive bays — up to 16 bays, specifically. This means a fully loaded NAS can hold up to 160TB of storage for all its users.

Second is the user workload rate of 300TB/year. That’s almost twice the rated workload rate of the regular Ironwolf which is 180TB. The workload rate is the average amount of data that can be written to the drive per year (TB/year) in order for it to be considered for warranty. That means the higher the work load (amount of data written), the higher the stress on the hardware, thereby increasing the chances that a drive will fail. Going back to the rating, a higher workload rate means the HDD is capable of taking on more load per year (stress).

The 3rd reason is warranty. While a typical HDD would have 2 years warranty, the IronWolf Pro has 5 year warranty on all its drives. This is 2 years longer than the 3 years warranty offered on the regular Ironwolf class drives. For corporate or enterprise environments, longer warranty is needed especially if the usage is for mission-critical tasks. A longer warranty also reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO). In some countries, the IronWolf Pro also comes with a 2-year Rescue Data Recovery Service.

For the purpose of our test, we used a QNAP 4-bay NAS using two of these Seagate IronWolf Pro 10TB. You can check out the video below for details on the set up and configuration:

Just like what we mentioned in our first test of the IronWolf, the IronWolfPro class comes with added features to help maximize its performance and health:

• Rotational Vibration (RV) mitigation. IronWolf Pro comes standard with RV sensors to maintain high performance in multi-bay NAS enclosures.
• AgileArray. AgileArray is built for dual-plane balancing and RAID optimisation in multi-bay environments with the most advanced power management possible.

The Seagate Ironwolf Pro is best fit for high-volume tasks such as private cloud, virtual storage, high-capacity backups, archiving and disaster recovery.

Here are the results from our previous tests:

PCMark 7 Score: 3,011
AIDA64 Test: 223MB/s (average)
CrystalDiskMark 3.0: 238MB/s (Read), 219MB/s (Write)

The 10TB IronwolfPro is definitely on top of its class in terms of endurance, work load rating and load capacity. It’s a hard-working drive, highly scalable and promises higher reliability and longer warranty. Whether you need a single 6TB drive or up to 16 of the 10TB drives (for a total NAS storage of 160TB), the IronWolfPro can deliver that.

The 10TB drives are available in Amazon.com for $479.99 (~Php23,750) while the 8TB variant is $384.99 and the 6TB is just $279.99.

Seagate Ironwolf Pro 10TB specs:
Usable Capacities: 10TB
Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm
No. of Heads: 14
No. of Platters (discs) 7
Cache: 256MB
Recording Method: Perpendicular
Areal density (Gb/in2 avg): 867
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Power-on Hours: 8,760
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): 1.2 million hours
Form Factor: 3.5in
Dimensions: 26.11 x 101.85 x 146.99mm
Drive Weight: 650g

What we liked about it:
* Biggest storage options
* Anti-vibration features
* Longer 5-year warranty
* Rescue Data Recovery Service in some countries