At first, we would like to thank Synology France and Seagate for sending out the IronWolf 4TB NAS HDD for testing and reviewing.

 

 

 

About Seagate:

 

“Seagate was founded on the belief that data is potential. Our goal is to help humanity maximize that potential by harnessing the datasphere, which is all around us. For over 38 years, we have driven innovation with precision-engineered hard drives and technology solutions that have empowered billions of people and businesses to realize their tasks and their dreams. And we’re just getting started.

 

Humanity is on the cusp of a new era, the data age. From smart personal devices to large-scale intelligent systems, our world is rapidly being transformed. Data is in flight all around us, affecting us personally, professionally and globally. Seagate will be there to pioneer the way toward a better, smarter tomorrow.”

 

Tough. Ready. Scalable.

 

For everything NAS, there’s IronWolf and IronWolf Pro. Always on and always working, IronWolf is enhanced with AgileArray technology for optimal reliability and system agility. Multi-user technology and extreme workload rates allow IronWolf to perform and scale up with your enterprise.

 

IronWolf + the Power of AgileArray

 

NAS-optimised hard drive for the best-possible user experience

IronWolf Health Management in compatible NAS systems continuously helps to safeguard the health of your data

Drive balance with Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors manage multi-bay vibration for long-term consistent performance and reliability

RAID performance optimised that maximises responsiveness and uptime with NAS-aware Error Recovery Control

Advanced power management saves energy and delivers the right power at the right time

 

Actively Protect Your Data With IronWolf Health Management in Popular and Enabled NAS

 

IronWolf Health Management is designed to operate on compatible NAS systems such as Synology and ASUSTOR. Populated with supported IronWolf or IronWolf Pro HDDs1 It improves the overall system reliability by displaying actionable prevention, intervention or recovery options for the user.

 

Multi-Bay and NAS-Ready With Built-In RV Sensor

 

First in its class, IronWolf drives are equipped with RV sensors on high capacity drives to maintain performance in multi-bay NAS enclosures. RV sensors on IronWolf Pro come standard, helping business and creative pros to have consistent performance for years to come.

Do More With Multi-User Optimisation

 

Do more with your NAS with multi-user optimisation. Enabling user workloads of up to 180 TB/year on IronWolf and 300 TB/year with IronWolf Pro, multiple users can confidently upload and download data to a NAS server. Whether you’re a creative pro or a small business, IronWolf is on your side.

IronWolf Pro Comes With 2-year Rescue Data Recovery Service

 

Your data is important and a Rescue plan provides peace of mind in case of unexpected data loss due to accidents or mechanical damage. The Rescue plan gives you access to a global team of world-class data recovery experts with 95% customer satisfaction rating.

 

Purchase and register an IronWolf Pro drive to activate your free Rescue plan and you are covered for 2 years. Extended coverage options available at registration.

 

Be Creative Anywhere With IronWolf and Your NAS

 

Extensible and reliable storage helps keep you and your creative business on schedule. IronWolf and IronWolf Pro are great companions for your NAS for 24×7 remote access, backups and file sharing from anywhere, making sharing ideas easy. For growing agencies and the need for more storage, IronWolf and IronWolf Pro are built to address NAS scalability challenges.

 

Grow Your Business NAS

 

A thriving small business needs storage that can thrive with it. IronWolf is optimised for NAS in multi-RAID environments that not only the vibration, but also handle the high user workload rate in a high data traffic network. Enter multi-user technology — up to 180 TB/yr for IronWolf, up to 300 TB/yr for IronWolf Pro.

 

Dominate The Media

 

Build your home NAS media empire with IronWolf HDDs. IronWolf and IronWolf Pro lead the class in storage capacity with drives as large as 10 TB, and the performance needed to run high definition content with your NAS. Store thousands of full-length HD films and even more photographs on your private server. Think of it as your home cloud.

 

 

The latest range of NAS HDDs from Seagate do include both IronWolf and IronWolf Pro, each covering different markets: the IronWolf is built specifically for connected homes, SOHO, and SMB NAS, does arrive in a wide capacity range, has AgileArray NAS optimization, rotational vibration sensors (from 4TB up to 12TB models), features optional rescue services and is multi-user optimized with a 180 TB/year user workload rate. When discussing about IronWolf Pro, these are oriented towards commercial and enterprise NASes, do feature the same Agile-Array NAS optimization, but the rotational vibration sensors are available as standard for all capacities (2TB up to 12TB) and the same goes for the rescue services. The Pros are also rated for 300 TB/year user workload rates, and while the IronWolf vanilla is covered by a 3-year warranty, the Pros do have a 5-year long warranty service.

 

Thanks to Synology France and Seagate, we were able to receive one 4TB sample of the IronWolf series, in a bulk format:

 

 

 

On the top drive cover, we will get to see a sticker with lots of information such as the internal HDD code name, its product serial numbers, the currently installed firmware, power rating, date of manufacture and more!

 

 

 

The lower right corner of the sticker does inform us of the utilized data transfer standard, but also the fact that this drive features Advanced Format 4K sectors:

 

 

 

Here are also some shots on the lateral sides of the IronWolf NAS 4TB:

 

 

 

 

A closer look does reveal the SATA Data/Power connectors, but also some additional factory pins:

 

 

 

On the bottom area of the drive, we will get to see the electronic board, which does also power the 5900RPM motor (7200RPM motors are available only beginning with 6TB versions):

 

 

 

 

The test bench was composed from the following hardware:

 

CPU: Intel I5 4690K Retail @ 4.6GHz

CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i GTX

Motherboard: BIOSTAR Z97X Gaming

RAM: GeIL Black Dragon 4x4GB DDR2133 (@1600)

Video: KFA2 1060 6GB

Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W

SSD: OCZ Vertex 3 240GB + OCZ Vertex 460

Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840

 

The drive has arrived unformatted:

 

 

In order to conduct our tests, we went ahead and formatted the drive to NTFS:

 

 

With AIDA64 Engineer software tool, we can extract more information regarding the internal drive:

 

 

CrystalMark

 

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

 

HD Tach

 

HD Tune

 

 

CrystalDisk

 

ATTO Disk Benchmark

 

 

The 4TB version of the IronWolf NAS series is able to deliver quite a bit of performance and considering that we are discussing about a 5900RPM model, it is even more impressive. This fact recommends it for both NAS usage but also as an internal drive where we can store backups or work on large projects which would not regularly fit on the SSD. The extra technologies such as AgileArray feature dual-plane balancing for getting an overall consistent performance, but also power management optimizations and higher reliability versus the regular desktop drives.

 

The 5900RPM model does also come with 64MB of cache, while the MTBF is rated at 1,000,000 hours; the higher specced 6TB up to 12TB versions do come with 7200RPM motors, but also increased cache size of 256MB. Regarding pricing, the 4TB version of the IronWolf NAS series is quite affordable at about 115 Euros, while the better-performing 6TB model jumps at about 177 Euros.

Seagate IronWolf 4TB NAS HDD is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank again to Synology France and Seagate for making this review possible!