In today’s world where we’re so data-centric and living large digital lives, storage is a critical aspect of life. Sometimes we want to keep all of our precious memories closer at hand than simply in the cloud, and at times we just want a plethora of storage in our home system so that we can install every game we own, and then some. Thankfully we’re bombarded with choices in which to do this. Ways to make a large, redundant personal cloud or to simply keep as a storage drive. Seagate has recently revamped their lineup of drives, rebranding some and completely remarketing. That also means tighter manufacturing tolerances and a more integrated and better quality control process too. This is to help shine a new light on a better managed storage company. There may have been some QC issues in the past, though not nearly as terrible as the IBM DeskStar incidents of yore, that was caught on in the minds of quite a few. There was a negativity that was perhaps unfounded, but it persisted and Seagate is rebranding and reworking everything to help increase public confidence.
Seagate IronWolf 10TB, a champion among its peers
Part of that is the re-naming of their lines. The NAS line is thus now called by the IronWolf moniker, equally speaking to its durability and the aggressive performance. Durability isn’t something we can test in the few weeks that we’ve had the drive, though we can certainly launch a long-term investigation as it’s put to work as a moderately used storage drive. But performance, that’s what we’ll be exploring today. Showing off the capabilities of the Seagate IronWolf 10TB. This drive is well sized, the maximum size of mechanical HDD’s available. Though Seagate themselves are well on the way to 60TB and beyond with Heat Resistant Magnetic Recording. But for now we’re “stuck” with platter drives at 10TB. Being so large, and so dense, durability is definitely a concern, though the IronWolf 10TB has been validated for up to 1 million MTBF at a workload of 180TB written per year. That’s not insignificant by any means. And Seagate is determined to show you it’s drives are not only fast, but reliable as well.
The IronWolf series itself is designed not necessarily for the single user in mind, though it would be a good choice given its capacity. It’s being marketed towards all conceivable sectors, from the personal cloud environment all the way to high-density datacenter RAID arrays. The firmware includes what they’re calling AgileArray, which includes a few features that can potentially keep your drives running healthy, and for a long time. In that it has what’s called Multi-Tier Caching technology, which is something that’s designed to help increase performance when it comes to random writes, a slower operation for any drive. With all the newfound technology they say that the theoretical sequential data transfer speed is at about 210MB/s. Quite speedy, then, for a patter-based HDD.
Specifications
The IronWolf series of HDD’s comes in three flavors at the moment. You can buy it in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB, 8TB and 10TB sizes. To ensure the heads and platters are well protected the top three capacities use a dual-plane balance technology and several rotational vibration sensors. The motors are also attached to the top cover, for added vibration tolerance. This means it’s designed for 24/7 operations, meant to run for many years before failures. They also carry a three-year limited warranty.
