The IronWolf design supports up to eight drive bay systems, and the IronWolf Pro supports up to twenty-four (recently upgraded from sixteen). It's more like ESP with the system monitoring hundreds of parameters, analyzing the data, and recommending replacements before tragedy strikes. Seagate recently increased the maximum recommended number of drives to twenty-four from sixteen and that increases the series' usefulness for cold storage. The Exos X uses different firmware optimization to support the increased vibration, has industry-leading 550-terabyte endurance and a massive 2.

The IronWolf base model competes head to head with Western Digital's Red (base series) that still uses the 5,900-RPM spindle speed. We rarely observe the Exos X pricing because the release cadence doesn't always come at the same time. It's also similar to my own NAS workload, although my family doesn't hit the system with the same intensity. For many, this is unexpected, but we've noticed the IronWolf performing better in some workloads over the years with other capacities. If you follow my other IronWolf reviews featuring the smaller capacities you already knew the IronWolf is slightly faster than the IronWolf Pro in smaller array deployments.Other than one drive I had replaced under warranty, the rest of the drives in my array have Load_Cycle_Count values around 1300 with over 21000 power-on hours. When you register your IronWolf or IronWolf Pro, you trigger Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Service. 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. Considering these are enterprise drives I'm thinking they could run a fair bit louder but I'm hoping for some actual data. 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. Secondly, the ST16000NM000J has a slightly higher data transfer rate ( 258MB/s) compared to the ST16000NM001G ( 249 MB /s) due to the higher density. The Exos X delivers superior random performance for cloud and rack-scale deployments but can also benefit smaller install bases. On paper, the IronWolf Pro outperforms the base IronWolf series in sequential transfers with the difference being 40 MB/s. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience.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. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform.