Seagate IronWolf 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s CMR 3.5" Internal HDD for RAID Network Attached Storage ST8000VN0022

Pros: The drive is massive in capacity. Relatively quiet for a NAS drive (not super loud but certainly not completely silent). The large cache really seems to help with speeds (see speeds below in Other Thoughts). To that note, the drive also seems to be able to spin up quite quickly. Even when under full load it manages to maintain a peak temperature of less than 35C at all times. I’d say that’s pretty good. Looking at the architecture, I’d wager that it’s built to last, with its large bearing/motor design. However, time will tell. You really see this drive excel in random reading and writing of small files. Which is probably what most people would be using NAS drives for. So far, it's held up to many many torture tests for this review.

Cons: Not a lot to put here. Obviously, this drive is still nearly 300 bones at the time of this review. That’s still a good chunk of money for a hard drive. That being said, it is 8TB. Seagate in recent years has had some problems with QA in some of their drive models. I can only hope that those days are behind them now. The drive is insanely heavy. Not that this matters a whole lot, but its over 700 grams!

Overall Review: Speed tests performed with Crystal DiskMark: ----------------------------------------------------------------------- CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 173.884 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 190.660 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.174 MB/s [ 530.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.159 MB/s [ 527.1 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 172.183 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 189.994 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.677 MB/s [ 165.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.111 MB/s [ 515.4 IOPS] Test : 32768 MiB [D: 67.4% (5019.7/7451.9 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2017/01/12 5:39:17 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64) Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 173.477 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 189.500 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.826 MB/s [ 689.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.374 MB/s [ 579.6 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 188.747 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 186.639 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.895 MB/s [ 218.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 2.392 MB/s [ 584.0 IOPS] Test : 1024 MiB [D: 67.4% (5019.7/7451.9 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2017/01/12 5:50:24 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64) Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 203.825 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 170.063 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 53.370 MB/s [ 13029.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 4.997 MB/s [ 1220.0 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 187.258 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 174.877 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 31.483 MB/s [ 7686.3 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 5.468 MB/s [ 1335.0 IOPS] Test : 50 MiB [D: 67.4% (5019.7/7451.9 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2017/01/12 5:55:25 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)

Pros: The IronWolf series of Seagate drives are intended for NAS installations. Upon receiving the drive, I popped it into one of my hot swap bays and the drive powered right up. The drive has eight 1.75GB platters spinning at 7200 rpm giving you 14TB, which results in 12.7 TB of usable space. The good news: This drive is fast; very fast in the world of spinner drives, that is. Seagate rates the sustained transfer rate for this drive at 210 MB/s. In synthetic benchmarks (ATTO, HD Tach, DiskMark) I’m seeing 250-260 MB/s. A quick local transfer test of folder containing 12GB files results in a real-world transfer rate of 248 MB/s. All of this is much faster than gigabit speed in typical networks, which will limit you to about 112 MB/s. The drive runs cool and is very quiet. It may even be quieter than my 5400rpm NAS drives. Seagate is currently the capacity leader in the industry and has even upped the ante with the recently released 16TB drives. If you want >12TB storage per drive, Seagate is pretty much the one choice right now… but it’s a good choice.

Cons: I did have some initial concerns with warranty on this drive. Seagate’s website has a warranty checker where you can enter your drive’s serial number and it will return the warranty end date. When I entered the serial number from my drive it came back as expired two months before I even received the drive. After some back and forth emails with Seagate support, it was finally revealed that the warranty was rescinded because the drive I received is a review unit. I’m not taking any eggs off for this. If that’s their policy then so be it. However, was given the impression in my correspondence with Seagate that the warranty clock may start ticking based on the manufacture date instead of the purchase date, although I cannot verify this. Regardless, I highly recommend all purchasers to verify the warranty using Seagate’s website if warranty term is important to you.

Overall Review: Seagate has several models of 14TB drives out there. In case it helps, here are the key differences between the 14TB models. BarraCuda Pro: General desktop storage, 300 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1 million hours, 5 year warranty SkyHawk AI: Surveillance and CCTV storage, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1.5 million hours, 3 year warranty IronWolf: NAS, 180 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1 million hours, 3 year warranty, up to 8 drives per enclosure IronWolf Pro: NAS, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 1.2 million hours, 5 year warranty, up to 24 drives per enclosure Exos: Enterprise data-center storage, 550 TB/year workload rating, MTBF = 2.5 million hours, 5 year warranty, up to 106 drives per enclosure

Pros: This drive delivers a ton of space and it feels very well built. It may sound strange but when I pick up a hard drive and it’s light as a feather, I feel discouraged, but this drive feels like it’s got some quality materials in its construction. In testing, the performance of the drive was outstanding. The throughput I achieved was very impressive, with read rates averaging 136MB/s and write rates averaging 88MB/s. I plan on using this drive to provide some additional space for a file server at my house, I am confident that it will hold up to the 24/7 operation and for this reason I’m glad it’s a NAS intended drive.

Cons: The drive is a bit louder than conventional hard drives I’ve worked with, but that’s not generally a problem for server or NAS type environments where the device is usually tucked away somewhere that noise isn’t much of a factor. In my file server, the fans will certainly still be louder than this hard drive. The drive runs fairly warm but not unreasonably so.

Overall Review: The benchmark I performed on the drive used a 50MB sample size across 1000 samples. Average read rate was 136.6MB/s, average write rate was 88.3MB/s, and average access time was 15.79ms. These are all great figures in my opinion and this seems to outperform desktop hard drives I’ve used. It also seems to outperform NAS rated drives from another popular drive manufacturer I’ve used. I’ve had some bad fortune with Seagate Barracudas over the years, but this drive gives me a lot of confidence and is a step toward earning back some of my respect for Seagate.

Pros: It doesn't get hot, decently fast. average write speed is around 200MB/s with maximum being right around 215MB/s. Tested With a Intel® Z77 Sata 3 Controller. I also tested this in my Qnas Qnap Network NAS and it works just fine there, but is bottlenecked by the Network transfer speed of 117MB/s This drive is designed to be reliable. Most of the features built into the IronWolf drives are designed to make it perfect for Network attached storage and Multi Drive enterprise type servers. It is designed to be comfortable in a 24/7 environment which would also be compatible with DVR use.

Cons: I have tested other drives intended for 24/7 use in the past and some of them keep the platter spinning and never park the heads, this reduces latency and seek time. but if the drive had no workload it would constantly move the heads back and forth while waiting for data to write and it would make a repetitive click sound. most techs know that sound as the click of death and it is a indication that the drive is damaged. I am pleased that this drive does not make that sound when it is idle. although access time of 9.3ms is a bit higher than other drives i have tested. I can be heard when writing data, usually it is silent, but certain workloads are louder than others. It is not loud enough to where it should be a problem though.

Overall Review: Overall these drives are good and reliable, This is my 4th IronWolf drive and i have not had a single problem with any of them. If you are planning to use this in a windows environment, drive partitioning will leave you with 5.45TB of storage space.

Pros: Great price per TB. Seagate service in my experience has always been more positive. I had a dead on arrival drive but Seagate got me set back up so I consider the Seagate portion of this to be a Pro. Shipping all spinning disk has the risk of DOA. Seagate sent me shipping labels prepaid to send the drive back and recieve a new one. So that was nice. Their support was always pleasant though may take ~12-18 hours for each response back and forth. A receipt will be required if you need a warranty claim so be sure to hang on to that. I received a new drive from Seagate which I put in a synology NAS. Given I have only 1 I wasn't able to put this in RAID. I started pushing backups to this and it really moves. I have backups going from a RAID5 on the NAS to this disk in the same NAS and the throughput is excellent. I setup an RSync job to keep a mirror now of my RAID5 array to this drive and the speed ie great, for spinning disk. With the 256MB Cache it keeps the sync going well. While not listed as a compatible device I was able to load this into other systems including my BuffaloTerastation 5600. Though did require firmware updates to make it so. I feel Seagate's support did everything they could to fix my issue.

Cons: It's tough to not consider getting a drive DOA a con. Shipping spinning disk is tough and this is no different than any other brand/disk. The drive spins pretty loudly while active. I started pushing backups to it to get a load of data on it and while running you can hear things spinning. Though when it goes idle it seems quiet.

Overall Review: All in all the drive does what I want. There will always be the flaws of spinning disk and transport but price per GB and the speed of the drive with Seagate's service will keep me as a customer here. Be sure to check the compatible NAS list but I'd also check your NAS firmware as plenty of NAS not on Seagate's confirmed list will manage the drive just fine as well.

Pros: A normal household could put all their data on this drive and still have room. The speed of the drive is as advertised considering hardware and use. Noise is what you would expect from the usual HDD you've been buying and using for years, in that way it is quiet. I could not hear the drive running over the fans in the case. With case open and the system running as quiet as possible, it sounded about the same as the other drives in my system. 3 year warranty is on the upper end of a non-enterprise drive like this, with an expected lifetime far into the future. Knowing how technology changes, it should last you until you no longer need it.

Cons: There are some reviews stating the drive failed within the first month of owning the drive or arrived DOA. While this is concerning, I have had the drive now just under a month and haven't had any issues. I'll continue to monitor and update if there are any changes. Just keep in mind when looking at negative reviews, that an individual with an issue is much more likely to post a negative review than an individual that got what they expected. Of course that doesn't erase the concern with negative reviews, it is however something I always keep in the back of my head when I look at products to buy.

Overall Review: When looking at a drive of this size and space, I'd generally purchase two for redundancy. To have a need for 14TB, there must be a lot of data you don't want to disappear suddenly. As it stands during the time I've had it, I'd purchase again.

Pros: OK, so its not the baddest, the Pro edition appears to have a higher warranty but otherwise the stats seem to be the same. This drive is the biggest and fastest consumer hard drive available on the market with 16TB of storage, 7200 RPM and 256MB of cache besting their competitors by a few TB. To put this into perspective, I have entire NAS units with 4-6 disks that don't have this much storage. Performance is incredible as you would expect, rivaling the fastest speeds you will find in a HDD. Once you exceed the limits of the cache, this drive does 218/220MB/s sequential read/writes which is about 10MB/s faster than the 10TB competitor Red drive I have from WD. Overall you can't go wrong with this much storage for long-term archival or NAS storage. I can now cut down my file servers shorter term storage with this single drive and then back up to my 6x10TB NAS unit. Game changer in terms of total storage size, hopefully it lasts for a long time!!!!

Cons: Expensive as usual for bleeding edge, especially if you are building a NAS or storage server.

Overall Review: The best right now for NAS/long-term storage, but for fast short-term storage you will still want an SSD. Personally I still think hybrid storage is the way to go with a fast m.2 as your OS/apps drive. A larger SATA SSD array for games/photos, a large HDD like this for fast high capacity backed finally by a NAS or storage server for long-term storage.

Pros: Pros: The Seagate Ironwolf 16 TB HDD is spacious, robust for a platter drive, and dense with a cache of 256 MB and a speed of 7,200 RPM on a typical SATA III power and data connection. You can really tell the platters are packed tight as this drive is a couple pounds or at least feels like it. Upon formatting in a Windows 10 x64 machine, this drive offers 14.5 TB usable. While this drive is intended for a NAS environment, I always utilize drives in a JBOD environment with manual RAID 1 so as to be more selective over data. On power-up, this drive is significantly louder than others I’ve owned, probably due to the seek arm aligning; however it presents no issue after a couple seconds. Reads: This Ironwolf drive performed surprisingly well in all read tests I ran on it. Utilizing HDTune, speeds started around 270 MB/sec and eventually fell to 125 MB/sec at the end of the platter structure. Access time was in the 14-16ms range with CPU utilization of 8-9% on a 7940X (14-core) system. Bursts were nearly at 500 MB/sec, however the cache fills quickly on a large transfer. Placing photography work on this new drive, it’s performed very well, and while not at the speed of an SSD, the cache helps to speed up short term data. This makes it feel at times like an SSD since my particular work is serial. Manually upping the queue / threads beyond 2 starts to make any performance metrics dip seemingly square to the amount of requests, though giving this drive many small files makes performance quite impacted. For an as-expected NAS environment though, most users are requesting a mix of files or larger transfers and I saw no issue with that given an expected performance drop. In Crystal DiskMark x64, this meant a sequential read of again, over 200 MB/sec; around 230. Yet any 4K data (where traditional HDDs struggle) relegated this drive to sub-2 MB/sec performance. As usual, if you need high performance on many tiny files, go SSD / NVMe. Writes: The writes on this drive proved similar to the read levels. Transfers start off fast, reaching around 250 MB/sec at the start of the platter, then falling in toothed fashion down to 125 MB/sec at the end. Bursts clocked in just under 300 MB/sec for writes which is very impressive for a platter drive. Access time was about 5-6ms, with identical CPU usage. Crystal DiskMark x64 echoed similar results as above, with writes reaching a generalized 250 MB/sec, yet at 4 KB file size, falling to 2.5 MB/sec. In sending over large amounts of data to this new working drive (over 5 TB), I saw the cache benefit greatly with video files and other large pieces of data, far exceeding typical transfer rates. Sometimes I’d see bursts to this drive at over 1 GB/sec, holding for a few, then moving down to the 200 MB/sec range so it simply depends on what you’re writing to this drive in terms of file make up to accurately gauge performance.

Cons: Cons: Normally one always brings up price as a con factor. As this drive is currently offering pretty much bleeding edge capacity, the price will naturally be high. I mean, it’s not a 16 TB SSD? No cons at this time. A longer warranty past 3 years would be nice.

Overall Review: Other: Overall, I am very impressed with this drive. It doesn’t sacrifice any performance (within the constraints of what platter based drives can achieve) despite its huge space. Overlapping work data onto this drive from other SSDs and HDDs took about 7 hours to write 5+ TB over part of a day. Of course I want to imply that if one intends to use all 14+ TB of this drive, start considering backups and mirrors of one’s data as this is getting to data center levels of capacity and 16 TB is a lot of space. My particular drive arrived in a small box with Jell-O plastic cushioners and barebones, yet was in good shape. SMART and other tests showed all sectors were good. We’ll see about how this drive holds up long term, as platter drives naturally have reputations for being sporadic on their lifespan and behavior from time to time. Operating temperature in a mounting cage in a Caselabs SMA-8 Rev. A with passive cooling / venting was about 35 C continuously, reaching about 41 C while writing. This variance is only due to my room fluctuating in temperature, but the drive’s range specifies from 5-70 C operating so clearly it can handle far worse. Doing large bursts of copying to this drive presented no issue, and I was getting advertised speeds at 33% use of the drive compared to my own diagnostics. Windows and this drive handled a few 600 GB to 2+TB copies like a champ, no issues. In terms of pricing, one may think it easier to buy two 8TB drives, but the cost for this singular drive is not too much higher and it’s nice that the pricing is still in the curve of efficiency. So if you have a ton of work, project data, RAW files, video, B-Roll, etc., and don’t mind this cavernous volume not being an SSD, what is presented here can’t be beat, well until probably next year when Seagate and others push 18+ TB to market.