Seagate IronWolf 12TB HDD Review

Introduction

Seagate launched "The Guardian Series" mid-2016 part of which was bringing back the Barracuda name and rebranding the NAS drive, IronWolf. That same day, we had several models for review including the 10TB Barracuda and 10TB IronWolf. A year later, Seagate is ready to unveil an even higher capacity, the 12TB IronWolf and we had a few sent over for review.

Seagate aims for the IronWolf series to be used in 1 to 8 bay appliances like Desktop RAID, NAS and small servers. For larger operations, you can move to the IronWolf Pro, built for up to 16 bay solutions. With each of these solutions built for 24x7 workloads, they come with some impressive technology.

For example, dual-plane balancing and RAID optimization along with advanced power management is tech Seagate is calling Agile-Array in addition to Rotational Vibration sensors to monitor and maintain performance in multi-bay environments. For those using these drives in modern NAS appliances from Synology, Asustor and others the addition of IHM or IronWolf Health Management allows the NAS system to more closely monitor your drives health to better protect and predict failures.

Looking at drive specifications, we start with the standard SATA 6Gb/s connection, 8-bay appliance support and workload rating of 180TB/yr. We again have mention of the RV and Dual-Plane Balancing along with Error Recovery Control present on all IronWolf models. Next, we move on to a 210 MB/s sustained transfer rate and 7200 RPM spindle speed. The drive cache is 256MB for the 6 through 12TB models and 64M for the 4TB.

Diving deeper we have Load/Unload cycles rated at 600K and NRER set at 1 per 10E15. Power on hours is rated at 8760 while the MTBF sits at one million hours. Power management gives us operational ratings of 7.8 watts average and 5 watts idle. With this new capacity, the IronWolf lineup now offers 1-4TB solutions along with 6,8,10 and class-leading 12TB models. The MSRP of the Seagate IronWolf 12TB comes in at $429.99 with a three-year warranty.