Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB 3.5″ HDD Review

How Much Does it Cost?

This is an extremely high-end drive due to its capacity being the biggest you can currently get in a 3.5″ form factor. As a result, you’ll be looking at a bill of around £500 per drive. Scan currently have it in stock for £479.99 + delivery. Not bad really, as this is only £20 more than the 18TB model! Again, this is not your typical consumer HDD, and likely way more than most people need. However, if capacity is extremely important to you, there’s nothing larger out there. The fact that you can now get around 100TB into a desktop-friendly five-bay NAS is bloody impressive.

Overview

20TB is an impressive amount of storage, to put that into “gamer” terms, CyberPunk 2077 1.5 would fit on there over 240 times, or the same as 800 (25GB) Blu-ray discs or 4000 DVDs. Or if you want to be more realistic, you could fit your average Call of Duty patch on there, but only just. Regardless of what you’re actually storing though, 20TB is going to be a lot of it.

While 2TB may not seem like a huge amount of difference from the previous 18TB model, keep in mind the form factor still isn’t changing. While you may not see much benefit in upgrading four 18TB drives to 20TB, keep in mind that extra storage space will stack up fast in larger installations. If you’re deploying 20+ of these in a server, you’re getting a lot more capacity without needing to invest in more bays.

I like that the price isn’t actually much more than the 18TB either, sure the drives are expensive, but they’re only £20 more than last years model right now, making them a very appealing option vs the 18TB. £20 more for 2TB isn’t going to make a huge difference to your overall budget here.

Running at 7200 RPM, these helium-filled drives are still managing to keep a good pace, even in today’s SSD loving market. The 256MB cache and SATA6 interface mean you can get pretty decent and consistent read speeds with really good response times (for a mechanical HDD). It’s not setting performance records, but it’s a bit bigger, a bit faster and a bit more efficient than last years model and well, it really doesn’t have to do anything else! Seagate’s own roadmap points to 30+ TB drives in the next year or two and 120 TB in the next decade… incredible! For now, though, 20TB is plenty impressive.