Seagate Exos X20 & IronWolf Pro 20TB HDD Review

1. Introduction & Drive Details
2. Synthetic Benchmarks: CDM, Anvil, ATTO, Blackmagic, AJA
3. Real-World Testing: TransfersPCM10
4. Final Thoughts

TweakTown's Rating: 100%

The Bottom Line

Perfection.

Introduction & Drive Details

If, as the saying goes, capacity is king, then Seagate's newest offerings wear the crown at a whopping 20TB. Seagate's newest IronWolf Pro is 20TB and aimed at NAS applications, bulk storage, or even proof of space crypto mining duties. The Exos X20 is Seagate's Enterprise variant of what is essentially the same 20TB 7,200 RPM helium-filled CMS-based HDD.

As we see it, Conventional Magnetic Storage, or CMS, is the way to go for consistency, reliability, and performance as opposed to competing recording technologies like SMR or Shingled Magnetic Recording.

Helium is also essential to the creation of these high-capacity offerings. Helium has been one of the greatest breakthroughs for high-capacity HDDs. Seven times lighter than air, helium creates less drag and turbulence when HDD platters spin. A sealed helium environment is humidity-free, enables cooler temperatures, increased storage capacity, lower power draw, and higher reliability.

The Exos X20, as it is intended for enterprise applications, is ideal for high-capacity servers, enterprise NAS systems, and bulk storage. The Exos X20 combines advanced write caching technology with up to 285 MB/s data transfer rates for best-in-class performance. Additionally, Exos is protected by Seagate Secure. The Exos X20 20TB is warranted for 550 TBW per year for five years.

The IronWolf Pro, intended for professional consumer applications, is warranted for 300 TBW per year for five years. Reliability is greatly enhanced with IronWolf Health Management or IHM. IHM is an embedded software application, which provides a highly effective drive health management solution. IHM notifies users of possible prevention and intervention actions, thereby reducing the probability of catastrophic failure and associated data loss.

Included free for 3-years with the IronWolf Pro is Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Services. The Rescue plan provides world‐class data recovery services with an industry‐leading 95% success rate. And finally, the IronWolf Pro 20TB has been tested by leading NAS system vendors for compatibility with their products.

Drive Details

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Physically, the drives are identical. We note differing firmware, and while we have no way to know, we expect the internals are identical, with firmware being the main differentiator.

Jon's AMD Test System Specifications

• Motherboard: ASUS ROG Crosshair Hero VIII Wi-Fi - Buy from Amazon
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X - Buy from Amazon
• Cooler: Alphacool Eissturm Hurricane Copper 45 - Buy from Amazon
• RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 4000 - Buy from Amazon
• Video Card: GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 WINDFORCE 8G - Buy from Amazon
• Case: PrimoChill's Praxis Wetbench - Buy from Amazon
• Power Supply: Corsair AX1000 - Buy from Amazon
• OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-bit - Buy from Amazon

Seagate Exos X18 18TB Enterprise HDD

	Today	Yesterday	7 days ago	30 days ago
	$299.99	$299.99	$329.99	$329.99	Buy
* Prices last scanned on 4/24/2024 at 6:30 pm CDT - prices may not be accurate, click links above for the latest price. We may earn an affiliate commission.

Synthetic Benchmarks: CDM, Anvil, ATTO, Blackmagic, AJA

Note: Exos X20 results are shown first or on the left when grouped.

CrystalDiskMark

Seagate specs both Exos X20 and the IronWolf Pro 20TB as capable of delivering a class-leading 285 MB/s throughput. CDM verifies this to be accurate. Upon closer examination, we find the IronWolf Pro to have slightly better random read performance, the Exos X20 3x better random write performance. This makes perfect sense considering each one's intended applications.

Anvil's Storage Utilities

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While its hard-to-find major differences between the two drives, a pattern is beginning to emerge. IronWolf Pro reads random data better, and the Exos X20 writes data better, especially random data where Anvil's is showing it to be 6x faster due to its advanced caching technology for enterprise workloads.

ATTO

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Sequential transfers at QD4 are not following the pattern we saw with CDM and Anvil's random performance. This time the Exos X20 delivers better sequential read and write performance. Both impress with class-leading throughput.

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

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While RAID arrays are the order of the day when employing HDDs for video processing duties, both drives demonstrate they are capable of handling most 1080p formats competently.

AJA Disk Test

We chose Canon RAW 1080p at a 16GB file size. We are showing both MB/s and FPS results. Again, both can handle 1080p formats pretty well.

Real-World Testing: TransfersPCM10

Note: Exos X20 results are shown first or on the left when grouped.

Transfer Rates

Both drives deliver identical and astonishing transfer rates considering these are HDDs. This is actually better than some low-end SATA SSDs can deliver. Impressive.

Again, identical transfer rates and again impressive for what they are. Class-leading performance.

PCMark 10 Data Drive Benchmark

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Random read performance has the biggest impact on the results of this testing, which is why the IronWolf Pro beats the Exos X20 by about 5%. This is exactly what our first benchmark, CDM, predicted would happen and by this exact amount.

Final Thoughts

20TB HDDs, wow, that's hard to fathom, yet here they are, and they are fast. We feel both drives are unquestionably best-in-class in every way - speed, density, endurance, reliability, all of it.

Seagate is leading the way to higher HDD capacities with advanced technologies like HAMR, so we were caught a little off guard because they've been able to get to 20TB with Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR). Impressive.

With speeds reaching 285 MB/s and currently the highest capacity ever offered by anyone have earned Seagate's newest our highest award and a 100% TweakTown recommendation.