Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB HDD Review: Seagate Drops the HAMR with the Biggest NAS Drive on the Market

For the true data hoarders

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Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB HDD
(Image: © Tom's Hardware)

Tom's Hardware Verdict

The Seagate IronWolf Pro is an Exos M designed for NAS with potentially better pricing. It’s the largest drive you’ll need for now.

Pros

  • +

    Up to 30TB of storage space

  • +

    Maximum performance is good

Cons

  • -

    High base cost

  • -

    Performance quirks

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The IronWolf Pro 30TB pushes the popular NAS hard drive series up to a new high capacity using laser-powered recording tech, so now you can have your favorite NAS drive with up to a whopping 30TB of storage without giving anything up. Seagate employs its new laser-powered heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology with this drive, a first for a mass-market hard drive.

The Mozaic 3+ technology platform enables an unprecedented amount of storage density by using a laser to heat a small area of the disk to 450°C (842°F) before recording data to it, thus allowing bits to be packed into a smaller area. For end users, there is no difference in use, performance, or reliability.

HAMR enables reaching a higher capacity ceiling without significantly increasing power consumption or heat production. That’s a great selling point as the IronWolf Pro is best used with two or more drives in a NAS system. If your drives are idle a lot, you’re also in good shape, as Seagate has specifically optimized for that condition. Performance also remains as expected, although Seagate has tuned the drive for mixed workloads and higher queue depths. What’s not to love?

Well, for one, the drive’s performance is not really breaking any new ground. This is expected, so it's not really worthy of a demerit. However, we can’t shake the feeling that this drive is made for more serious workloads, which makes it less attractive to everyday users. Also expected, given the drive’s high base price. Dropping over $1,000 for two of these even at 28TB is not something you would do lightly. The relative cost – $ per terabyte – isn’t too bad, but many people could be better off going with older drives in the ~20TB range. This means this drive is meant for scenarios where data density is the number one priority.

Seagate IronWolf Pro Specifications

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Header Cell - Column 0

Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB

Seagate IronWolf Pro 28TB

Capacity

30TB

28TB

Model #

ST30000NT011

ST28000NT000

Pricing

$549.99

$529.99

Cost per TB

$18.33

$18.93

Interface

SATA 6 Gb/s

SATA 6 Gb/s

Form Factor

3.5"

3.5"

Technology

CMR

CMR

RPM

7,200

7,200

Sustained Transfer Rate

275 MB/s

270 MB/s

Cache

512MB

512MB

Operating Power

8.3W Avg / 6.8W Idle

8.3W Avg / 6.8W Idle

Noise

32dB (Typ)

32dB (Typ)

Workload Rate Limit

550 TB/Yr

550 TB/Yr

MTBF

2.5M hours

2.5M hours

Warranty

5-Year / 3-Year DR

5-Year / 3-Year DR

The new Seagate IronWolf Pro adds 28TB and 30TB to its capacity offerings, both with the performant conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology that doesn't involve performance tradeoffs like we see with cheaper shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard drives. Seagate uses this same tech in its enterprise-focused Exos 30TB drive, though things diverge a bit as the Exos M has a 32TB CMR planned with SMR options up to at least 36TB. Still, these are very similar drives with almost identical specifications. The IronWolf Pro can hit up to 275 MB/s with sustained transfers, and it has 512MB of DRAM cache.

Currently, the 30TB IronWolf Pro is priced at $549.99 on Seagate’s website, and the 28TB model is $529.99 on Amazon, although both prices are discounted. This makes it less expensive than the Exos M, which makes it not a bad deal at all.

As with the Exos M, the IronWolf Pro is warrantied for five years with a 550TB per year workload rate limit (WRL). In addition, the IronWolf Pro comes with three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services, which makes it more consumer-friendly versus the enterprise-focused Exos M. The drive is otherwise optimized for use in NAS.

Seagate IronWolf Pro Software and Accessories

Seagate has the same downloads for the IronWolf Pro that it does for the Exos M: SeaTools and DiscWizard. SeaTools is for diagnostics and drive monitoring and works in both Windows and Linux with graphical and command-line interfaces. DiscWizard is for formatting, partitioning, and preparing drives for use. The IronWolf Pro then diverges from the Exos M by having IronWolf Health Management (IHM) which is active protection for the drive to assist with maintaining the drive and its data in NAS use. This further emphasizes that the IronWolf Pro is intended for different environments than the Exos M.

Seagate IronWolf Pro: A Closer Look

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Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB HDD
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The IronWolf Pro PCB looks very similar to the Exos M, the primary difference being that the DRAM is made by Nanya instead of Winbond. It is otherwise comparable. This is not unexpected, and we regularly see different brands of DRAM used on SSDs for metadata caching. The other main memory here is ICs of NAND and NOR flash memory for use by the drive controller.

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Seagate IronWolf Pro 30TB HDD
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The IronWolf Pro uses the same controllers as the Exos M, too. The SMOOTH Thor by STMicroelectronics is designed for power management and motor control, while Seagate’s 12nm ASIC serves as the primary controller for drive and media operations. From the hardware side of things, the two drive lines are identical, although there are firmware and feature differences. The drive has also been certified compatible with certain NAS systems, such as QNAP, with a focus on AI use cases.

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Shane Downing
Shane Downing
Freelance Reviewer

Shane Downing is a Freelance Reviewer for Tom’s Hardware US, covering consumer storage hardware.

9 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Darryl_Fallon_222
    All this is of little use until they make some radical changes:
    all heads read/write simultaneous access. They don't need to be mechanically fully independent, just able to R/W at the same time. On drives with 10 platters/20heads, this would mean peak transfer speeds would skyrocket from 200ish MB/s to 4GB/s peak. Even random access time and IOPs would improve tremendously.
    two heads per surface for redundancy and performance
    improved repairability - ability to swap PCBs if needed etc, ability to read and save internal data in EEPROMs and surfaces that would be crucial for recovery, opensourcing the tools and docs, needed for recovery
    mandating data integrity extensions T-10 (SAS) and T-13(SATA) and using them by default. by HBA and RAID controllers. Having a hash bytes along each sector and system setting/checking them at each transfer would fix a lot of things
    ability for a drive to work as RAID itself, including RAID-5/6 internally
    PCIe or (next-gen?) SAS instead SATA
    Without this, use of such drives will be ever more constrained, limited.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I'm planning to drag my feet on HAMR drives at home, at least until they undergo a couple more generations of refinement.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    all heads read/write simultaneous access. They don't need to be mechanically fully independent, just able to R/W at the same time.
    They can't. The alignment of tracks on different platters drifts too much. I was pretty shocked, the first time I learned about that, but if it were a solvable problem the HDD industry would've solved it. Increasing densities have made it much worse. It's well outside the realm of feasibility.

    The only thing even close to this are dual-actuator drives, which double peak throughput by letting you simultaneously access platters in each half of the drive at the same time. Obviously doesn't help for accessing more than one platter in the same half of the drive.

    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    two heads per surface for redundancy and performance
    It's cheaper to do redundancy by other means (i.e. RAID). I assume if it were even feasible to put two heads on the same platter, the dual-actuator drive would work this way.

    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    improved repairability - ability to swap PCBs if needed etc, ability to read and save internal data in EEPROMs and surfaces that would be crucial for recovery, opensourcing the tools and docs, needed for recovery
    Most of their customers don't need this, since they use RAID and backup strategies, yet adding this flexibility increases costs for everyone. Also, don't data recovery firms routinely transplant chips from one PCB to another?

    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    ability for a drive to work as RAID itself, including RAID-5/6 internally
    I don't see the point of this. The drive is still your single point of failure. If you're worried about unreadable blocks and don't want multiple drives, the filesystem layer could always implement a redundancy & error-recovery scheme, but it'd come at the expense of performance (and usable capacity).

    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    PCIe or (next-gen?) SAS instead SATA
    It's coming, but the media transfer rates on even the highest-density hard drives are still within SATA 3 data rates. I get that NVMe has other benefits, but I'm not sure if it has much value for NAS users.

    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    Without this, use of such drives will be ever more constrained, limited.
    Totally agree. Check & rebuild times are among the reasons I'm still using 8 TB drives.
    Reply
  • SomeoneElse23
    "data hoarders" isn't a nice statement.

    Some people like storing their stuff in the cloud ... until the cloud lets them down.

    The rest trust their data to their own reliable storage.

    Be nice TH.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    SomeoneElse23 said:
    "data hoarders" isn't a nice statement.

    Be nice TH.
    I agree. I think the author is trying to be cute, but it's not a good idea to insult your readers.

    @Paul Alcorn
    Reply
  • vanadiel007
    In my opinion, a con for these drives should be the size.
    It's great to have 30 TB of storage, but there will be many who will loose everything they stored on it once the drive dies because most do not use any backup or redundancy methods.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    vanadiel007 said:
    In my opinion, a con for these drives should be the size.
    It's great to have 30 TB of storage, but there will be many who will loose everything they stored on it once the drive dies because most do not use any backup or redundancy methods.
    That happens today, with drives of 1TB.

    ex: https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/i-cant-lose-this-external-ssd.3885654/
    Reply
  • SomeoneElse23
    vanadiel007 said:
    In my opinion, a con for these drives should be the size.
    It's great to have 30 TB of storage, but there will be many who will loose everything they stored on it once the drive dies because most do not use any backup or redundancy methods.
    This, I think, is why Seagate advertises their data recovery services as well.

    All my family members seem to have no idea their data is sitting in one location and when, not if, that location fails, it's all gone.

    That said, I don't think the average user will be buying this. In fact, I don't know why any "average user" would buy a hard drive anymore.
    Reply
  • Li Ken-un
    Darryl_Fallon_222 said:
    mandating data integrity extensions T-10 (SAS) and T-13(SATA) and using them by default. by HBA and RAID controllers. Having a hash bytes along each sector and system setting/checking them at each transfer would fix a lot of things
    As much as I would like stuff like T-10, formatting the disk drive with it enabled by default would make these unusable on a Windows machine out of the box. As far as I know, only Linux will read and write to devices which expose sector metadata.

    It’s catches a lot of noobs off guard who buy used enterprise HDDs and SSDs off eBay and don’t know how to reformat the drive to make it the normal 512-byte or 4096-byte sectors that Windows recognizes.

    Having T-10 off by default would avoid creating such a situation. Users who need it could turn it on or Seagate could introduce a SKU variant which has it on out of the box. HDD and SSD manufacturers need to advertise the feature better though. I look for drives with this feature and sometimes it’s disguised as “end-to-end protection” with “end” being undefined. Often, they do not even mention it in the datasheets.
    Reply