Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB 3.5″ HDD Review

Seagate is one of the biggest names in the world of storage. They create everything from affordable storage for consumers, right up to the huge arrays that power many of the worlds largest servers and even supercomputers. While the HDD I’m looking at today is technically more on the consumer side, it’s certainly close to their enterprise-grade hardware too. I remember one of my first PC’s having a 500MB hard drive and that being regarded as kick-ass for the time. I remember building another PC and I put not one, but two 6GB drives in there, and my friends said it was complete overkill! So imagine my face now to think that we have a 20TB drive in the same 3.5″ form factor around 20 years later, or more than 1600x the capacity of both my old HDDs combined. There’s no need to beat around the bush here, that’s a LOT of storage, and frankly, pretty incredible.

IronWolf Pro 20TB

Of course, a drive like this isn’t going to come cheap, as this is the latest flagship drive in this form factor. It’s not so much about the overall cost of the drive, but how much capacity you can have in a given space, as larger storage spaces can cost more than the drives, especially in server farms. While Seagate does make an enterprise version of this drive (Exos X20) for such installations, the one I have is the IronWolf Pro series, a more enthusiast consumer and SMB focused drive that’s suitable for NAS storage in general, and recommended for installations of up to 24 drives per device. For security systems, huge PLEX servers, or high-capacity backups, 20TB per bay is going to get a lot of work done.

When integrated into compatible NAS systems, these drives provide overall system reliability increases due to IronWolf Health Management (IHM). In addition, the IronWolf drives include a robust three-year Rescue Data Recovery Services plan.

Features

• Optimised for NAS with AgileArray – AgileArray enables Dual-Plane Balancing and TimeLimited Error Recovery to deliver best-in-class RAID performance in multi-bay systems.
• Always On, Always Accessible – IronWolf Pro drives are designed for 24×7 usage, allowing users to access their data anytime, anywhere.
• All-CMR Portfolio – All IronWolf Pro drives utilise Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) technology for consistent, best-in-class NAS performance.
• Built Tough – IronWolf Pro drives are rated for 300 TB/Y workload, allowing commercial and enterprise NAS users to seamlessly store, share and collaborate on large amounts of networked data.
• Class-Leading Reliability and Dependability – IronWolf Pro drives are rated for 1.2M hours MTBF and include a 5-year limited warranty for hassle-free data storage and best-in-class total cost of ownership (TCO).
• Rotational Vibration (RV) Sensors – Built-in RV sensors for vibration tolerance and consistent performance in multi-bay systems.
• IronWolf Health Management (IHM) – Actively protect your NAS data with Prevention, Intervention, and Recovery recommendations to ensure peak system health.
• Peace of Mind with Data Recovery – IronWolf Pro drives include 3 years of complimentary Rescue Data Recovery Services – in-house secure facilities, with an industry-leading recovery rate of 95% – so you do not have to incur high recovery costs in the event of accidental data corruption or drive damage.

What Seagate Had to Say

IronWolf drives provide a workload rate of 180 TB/year with scalable 24×7 performance that can handle multi-bay NAS environments, as well as capacities up to 12 TB. Those are best suited for 1 to 8 bay configurations. However, since this is a Pro drive, it can deliver a workload rate of 300 TB/year and 1- to 24-bay network-attached storage (NAS) configurations. More details at IronWolf NAS Hard Drives | Seagate UK.