Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drive ST6000VN0041

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After some back and forth emails with Seagate support, it was finally revealed that the warranty was rescinded because the drive I received is a review unit.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: 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: The storage capacity of this drive is amazing, more storage space than a regular would know what to do with.
Huge 256MB cache.
1 million hours of expected uptime before a failure, 180TB read/write a year.
Doing some real life write tests and it was about 194MB’s, not to much off their claimed speeds but hardware difference and product quality affect these speeds.
The drive does stay generally cool during long read/write cycles.
Pretty quiet drive noise operation when it’s writing.
Overall no problems installing or using the drive and operated as expected.

Cons: Warranty is only 3 years vs a WD 14TB which has a 5 year warranty.
The Price, at $500 this amount of space does not come cheap but high capacity NAS drives are usually never cheap. It will come down over time but it’s still a real eye opener for most people when they see the cost.

Overall Review: All the negative review comments have me a bit concerned on the product life and general high failure rate. I have been using it for two weeks now and wrote about 7TB of data to it and seems to be holding up so far. Losing that amount of data would be a nightmare for most people. At this point you see a backup for the backup and at what point does it stop? I am just using it as a mass storage backup drive rather than an active hard drive constantly accessing data from so hopefully that adds to the life span. It should also be noted the negative reviews are for the lower size drives rather than this 14TB drive size but are still in the same IronWolf product line.

Pros: A trusted brand, engineered for a specific job, Available as a 5900 or 7200RPM drive and in multiple capacities to fit your needs, 64MB Cache. (on a side note: Hey Seagate, I love the Icons that have been developed of each of the families of drives!)

Cons: Access time does take a small hit on the 5200 RPM unit but for most users like me for home entertainment purposes it will perform well enough. If you require faster access times just go with the 7200 RPM unit instead, but then you have more spin-up time.

Overall Review: Rather than copy and paste all the results from my testing I will simply say that the specs that Seagate lists on this drive are within a reasonable approximation of the data that I acquired during my testing. Placed this drive into my RAID array and it went to work without any trouble or further intervention from me. Once in the Raid case it is virtually silent, no more noisy than any of the other drives that turn at 5900 R’s . I have always purchased the Seagate Surveillance grade HDD’s to use in my HTPC system arrays and they have always worked well for me and I have had some in use for more than 5 years now. Time will only tell how the IRONWOLF holds up, hence I dropped the 5th egg. I will say that it has to be proven to earn that last egg. I have always preferred Seagate over others, I hope this one maintains my trust, for the time being all going 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: It’s quiet in use and when idle – just like the Seagate Pipeline drives we’ve had for a couple of years.

Vibration and noise are truly minimal when standing upright in a hard drive dock on a shelf. One might think that when installed and attached in a horizontal position within a PC case it would be virtually silent, and that would not surprise me.

Used as a single drive i obtained the following results:

CrystalDiskMark Sequential Read/Write in USB 3.0 HDD dock: 175/175 MB/sec.

HDTune Read in USB 3.0 HDD dock: Max. 179 – Min. 77 – Avg. 141 MB/sec.

Cons: Anti-vibration and anti-noise features appear to provide similar results as our existing Seagate 2TB drives which are not “Ironwolf” branded. As previously mentioned these are good features, but are they really new features or simply dressed up with a new name and colorful label?

When a Seagate home server drive i reviewed in the past failed after a few months the company politely refused to replace it, stating that it was a review sample and they wouldn’t cover it. Suspecting it may have been the small circuit board installed adjacent to the drive in a poorly ventilated case, i asked to buy a replacement board as a spare part. Again, they declined. As a result, this new drive will need to prove itself over a few years before earning a full 5 eggs rating.

Overall Review: Regarding this Ironwolf’s 5900 rpm rotation speed I have noticed elsewhere that some users have criticized the drive for not being faster. Yet, they have all praised it as being a good performer while operating quietly. If you think about it i’m sure you will realize that if the drive is quiet, smooth and fast enough for your needs then the rotational speed doesn’t matter. In fact, 5900 rpm may well enjoy a longer life than a 7200 rpm drive, who knows?

Since the Ironwolf is nice and quiet i wanted to see how this “always-on” type of drive might fare as a DVR replacement drive. Set it to record 3 TV programs at once using Windows Media Center while at the same time using it to stream previously recorded video to 3 other computers over our home network. The streaming was smooth and glitch-free. The recordings which were in progress exhibited a momentary macro-block pixelation glitch when replayed later. These glitches coincided with the onset of streaming requests from the other computers. I see that as more of a momentary throttling of the network by our router than as a direct shortcoming of the Ironwolf drive. Still, that type of glitch does not normally occur when using our usual Pipeline drive or a WD Red which we occasionally employ for recording.