Question 1

Is there a reason to prefer the Ironwolf Pro over this in a NAS? It's currently less expensive, same warranty.

Accepted Answer

Ironwolf Pro comes with a standard data recovery service if the drive fails while the exos it is an optional separate purchase for the data recovery service.

Question 2

Seagate has told me that there is an OEM version of this drive and that they are under no obligation to provide an original firmware file when it's an OEM drive.  How is an OEM drive determined (other than Seagate's data base)?  Is there such a thing as a non OEM version of this drive?

Accepted Answer

I use these of 8 and 10 size in Dell Gen 13 servers a lot, in OMSA they show as "Non-critical" which means not original and Lifecycle Controller doesn't offer firmware upgrades on them.

I've never upgraded firmware and they stay up pretty well : the 8T have few years of runtime, 10T are too new but out of 24 I had, none failed, 10-s have better MTBF and power consumption than 8-s.

My choice is simple - they're 1/2 to 1/3 of Dell price, come with 5 year warranty standard (vs 3 via Dell), I just keep one or two spares on datacenter shelf and watch SMART stats auto probes (custom script using smartctl) and iDRAC alerts, only use RAID6. Highly recommended and having OEM firmware for Dell for gen 12 and 13 is not critical. Controller accepts them as storage just fine.

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