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The test comes from Dell's performance lab and is similar to what a large office with several users working from the NAS is like. With the introduction of the X18 platform, Seagate introduced a new part number for 16TB Exos drives - ST16000NM000J. The real issue at this time with the IronWolf Pro is the current pricing pressure from Exos X in large capacities.
Normally we expect to see a cadence with IronWolf on the low-end, IronWolf Pro in the middle and Exos X at the top with the highest cost per drive. The mixed workload and 70% read charts show us more of the performance inconsistency at very high queue depths.
The three products we tested today cover all of these areas and that's likely why Seagate chose to focus on the 16TB launch here first rather than other product lines like Skyhawk and BarraCuda. The IronWolf Pro uses optimizations to ensure steady and reliable performance in environments with more vibration. FWIW, I also have 8 Exos 16TB drives in my NAS, and it's been in service (as my home NAS) since early 2020, with no drive failures (they're currently hanging off an LSI 9211-8i SAS HBA flashed with P20 IT firmware).
So I'm looking at getting a few of these for my my NAS but I'm having trouble finding any data on noise levels. This series comes from Seagate's enterprise product line designed for hyperscale and cloud datacenters.The IronWolf Pro has the same capacity advantages over the Red Pro, and the dollars per gigabyte value is favorable, as well. This is a free feature for the IronWolf Pro series for two years and an optional add-on for IronWolf and Exos X. The Exos X uses different firmware optimization to support the increased vibration, has industry-leading 550-terabyte endurance and a massive 2. The IronWolf design supports up to eight drive bay systems, and the IronWolf Pro supports up to twenty-four (recently upgraded from sixteen). By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising.
The base IronWolf slightly overtakes the IronWolf Pro in our eight-drive array, but if we used a larger array, the two would reverse with the Pro extending the lead with each drive we add to the system.
The series works better in large disk deployments that exceed the recommended drive count of the base IronWolf. Most IronWolf drives simply fall into mass storage roles hold cold data for end-users be them consumers, creators, or businesses. The new information in this article is how the Exos X series fits in the mix to round out the NAS-optimized trio. Current pricing makes the Exos X series more attractive in performance-focused deployments, but you do lose some consumer/prosumer features like two years of free data recovery found on the IronWolf Pro, and advanced disk health monitoring found on both IronWolf and IronWolf Pro series. There are two SATA models, the standard model (the drive we are reviewing here) which is the ST16000NM001G – and then there is a SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) version, the ST16000NM003G.
Hard disk drives deliver inconsistent performance under heavy workloads compared to enterprise solid state drives. The Exos X shows a little more inconsistency compared to the two IronWolf series in preconditioning with a heavy workload. The first thing you will clearly notice is the Exos walking away from the two IronWolf models and in some workloads double and tripling random read performance.
Considering these are enterprise drives I'm thinking they could run a fair bit louder but I'm hoping for some actual data. A strong roadmap featuring dual independent actuator arms and even lasers mounted to heads that heat the platters prior to writing data show Seagate doesn't plan to slow innovation. Even though we don't have flash sitting in front of the arrays today, we still show the preconditioning and steady-state charts that will allow you to compare these three products to other products and array types later. The series now ships in two capacities not found on the Western Digital Red series, 14TB and 16TB and has the performance advantage thanks to superior platter rotational speeds.
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