SEAGATE

Ironwolf 12TB NAS Review

Last month we looked at the Seagate Ironwolf 6TB, today Seagate has sent us their higher capacity top of the line Ironwolf 12TB drive, which we will be looking at through the same tests and see the difference that jumping up in capacity makes!
Seagate With Their Entry In The NAS Market With Ironwolf Drives
Seagate’s AgileArray technology is several features that have been designed to provide a better user experience. Here we will list the features:
-IronWolf Health Management in their compatible NAS systems continuously helps to safeguard the health of your data
-Drive balance with Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors manages multi-bay vibration for long-term consistent performance and reliability
RAID performance optimized that maximizes responsiveness and uptime with NAS-aware Error Recovery Control
-Advanced power management saves energy and delivers the right power at the right time
Seagate does go above and beyond with things that aren’t listed on the box. For instance, Seagate attaches the spindle to both the top and bottom of the case which will improve stability. The drives also support the ATA-8 streaming command set for increased performance when doing large sequential transfers. This allows the IronWolf to handle a maximum of up to 64 data streams simultaneously.
AgileArray also features optimized power management that provides a faster response time while still reducing power consumption.
When Seagate samples HDDs they do not send them in retail boxes, so the packaging here is minimal. We have the standard plastic antistatic bag most HDDs ate shipped in and see for the most part a standard drive built for NAS purposes.
This drive has slightly different locking positions compared to regular consumer HDDs, check your drive cages and if you have 2 small rounded pieces sticking out of the bottom of the cage to “lock” the drive in place you need to either get rid of them with a file/Dremel or use another drive cage. This was an Issue I ran into with my Phanteks case, though other drive caddies that I had on hand fit just fine.

Testing Setup

Component
Model
CPU-AMD Ryzen R7 1700 @ 3.4GHz
Memory-G.Skill Ripjaws 16GB 3200MHz
PSUXFX 1050W
OS-Windows 10-64 Bit Spring 2018 Update
Motherboard-Asus X370 ROG Hero IV
SSD-Patriot Burst 480GB
MyDigitalSSD SuperBoost2 512GB

I use a Ryzen test bench for my reviews, since most other websites test with Intel mainstream platforms, I personally think this is useful for all of those users who are using AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and AM4 socket motherboards to get a good idea on what kind of performance they should expect. For this review we didn’t have much on hand that was comparable to this drive, so the main idea here is to show its relative performance to an older higher-end HDD. While it is not necessarily a fair comparison it is a good representation of how much hard drives have come in terms of performance. I was considering adding an SSD as a baseline of high-end performance, but ultimately decided against it, I would like to know what our reader’s thoughts are on this though and would appreciate further input.


Alex Stevens