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Comparison Products
Aside from the Seagate Exos M, which is the only other drive we’ve tested at 30TB to date, we have a good sampling across the range of high-capacity drives from the previous generation. These include the 22TB WD Gold, the 20TB WD Red Pro, the 20TB Toshiba X300 Pro, the 20TB Seagate SkyHawk AI, as well as the 20TB Seagate Exos X20 and IronWolf Pro. Some of these can go up to 24GB or 26GB, but the general performance range is the same. These drives often use the same hardware within the same brand, but with different optimizations or warranties. The closest comparison, in this case, should be made to the WD Red Pro, as it – like the IronWolf Pro – is made for the NAS segment.
Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark
Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.
The IronWolf Pro scores exactly in line with the Exos M, as expected. Its performance is neither good nor bad, but rather somewhere in the middle. Generally, we don’t suggest using an HDD for gaming, so these results may be less interesting than others.
At the time of review, we would recommend the 12TB WD Blue, which can be purchased directly from WD with CMR technology at 7,200 RPM, if you want an HDD for gaming. HDDs can still make sense for some games, particularly older games, or they can be a backup repository for stale games to which you will eventually return. This can save on bandwidth if you have slow or limited Internet access, or are going on the road. This recommendation only applies to smaller, consumer drives, as you can get NAS-focused drives at higher capacities for the same price per terabyte if your budget is bigger in absolute terms.
Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark
PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.
The PCMark 10 results are also somewhat disappointing. We don’t think any HDD makes sense for a primary drive for your OS as boot and application load times will be much higher. HDDs make more sense as secondary drives for assets, archiving, media, and larger files. HDDs also make sense for content creation not only for these types of files but also for stream recording, as that is a sequential workload with relatively modest performance requirements. It seems like the last generation of drives from Seagate might be the way to go if you need lots of space but not 30TB+ of space.
Transfer Rates — DiskBench
We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.
The IronWolf Pro is able to write at a fast speed, but its reads are more underwhelming in our DiskBench testing. The overall copy speed is acceptable. This test involves files of various sizes, which is more indicative of consumer use than enterprise, so take that into consideration.
While it’s true that a NAS HDD might also see a range of file types, for the most part, you are dealing with larger files with the possibility of ingress caching, where theoretical speeds might be hit more often than with SSDs. That is, workloads that match an HDD’s performance profile should be more consistent. If you are looking at a drive for general storage, though, we would again recommend the last generation of drives.
Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark
ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads. These tests can also be useful for comparing HDDs, too.
In ATTO the IronWolf Pro generally managed better than the Exos M, at least with smaller block sizes. It’s possible that the IronWolf Pro is optimized for a larger range of I/O or file sizes while the Exos M is really intended for big data chunks. The Exos M does have better peak performance in sequential I/O in CrystalDiskMark. Still, the last generation of drives performs well enough that you need to be sold on capacity to look at these 30TB drives. That makes sense since, let’s be honest, most people aren’t looking to buy just a single $550-600 HDD. The name of the game is density.
Random 4K performance is average to poor, but we are aware that Seagate has optimized these drives for mixed workloads usually with larger than 4K I/O and at higher queue depths. SSDs are the obvious way to go when dealing with smaller I/O and when latency is critical. For more predictable workloads where you have large datasets, though, an HDD like this can make more sense, particularly when you compare the cost to a ~30TB SSD.
Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery
We use Iometer to hammer the HDD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.
HDDs love nothing more than sustained writes with a generous 1MiB block size and plenty of queue depth. All of the tested drives return consistent results with the 30TB ones coming out on top. The performance difference between the best and the worst here is minute, so once again it’s more about the capacity.
Power Consumption and Temperature
We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.
Seagate went to some pains to improve power efficiency on these new, larger drives. Although the efficiency doesn't look the best in our results, keep in mind this is because the drives perform similarly, but you’re working with up to 50% more capacity. Average power consumption is essentially the same. Our idle power testing is also not favorable for Seagate’s new drives – Seagate specifically improved idle power consumption, but our testing is worst-case in terms of power settings.
As a result, home users won’t see much benefit here. Systems with multiple drives and proper configuration, on the other hand, could see greater savings. On the whole, even if the drives only perform equally, there is still a significant advantage in storage density with little need for additional cooling. This is where these 30TB drives shine. For simpler systems or if you are only going for one drive, the last generation remains compelling.
Test Bench and Testing Notes
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Graphics | Intel Iris Xe UHD Graphics 770 |
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We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability.
Seagate IronWolf Pro Bottom Line
The Seagate IronWolf Pro gets a half-star better score than the Exos M for two good reasons: one, it has support that’s more attractive to regular users, and two, it looks like it might be priced better as well. Peak performance is still excellent – it’s as fast or faster than any other HDD on the market – and, despite quirks in some tests, it’s fast enough for what an HDD needs to do. This is especially true for NAS, which is stream-focused, not that it or the Exos M are bad at enterprise workloads. The difference here is that the IronWolf Pro has a three-year data recovery service and, in general, is designed for easier health monitoring. It’s also already been discounted with a price per terabyte that’s fairly competitive with last-generation HDDs.
There are some problems with this drive, though. The first is that it’s designed to be operated in units with two or more drives, which, given the base price, is quite expensive. It makes sense for small- and medium-sized businesses for on-premises storage and might be a dream come true for some home labbers and certainly data hoarders. In these situations, it could be a good alternative to the Exos M if you really need ~30TB/drive density. It’s a much harder sell for a regular home user who can make do with 20TB or smaller drives at a lower absolute price point.
The second problem is that the drive does have some performance quirks in our tests, which, again, seem to make the drive more viable for heavy workloads than basic file storage. This isn’t a real issue at the moment, given the barriers to entry at this capacity – this isn’t your father’s WD Black HDD – but it does underline the notion that this is a niche solution at the moment. AI enthusiasts will undoubtedly recognize the value, but you can likely make do with less storage density for most basic needs. Seagate went to considerable effort to reduce power consumption on this drive, but this is again relative to the capacity, so shop with your priorities in mind.
On the whole, we like this drive as it continues the IronWolf line, and what makes it great, just at a much bigger size. Bigger drives are to come, sure, but there was a decent stall period around 20TB. It can replace specialized drives – such as the SkyHawk AI/Purple for surveillance – in a pinch if you’re impatient, too. If you’ve been waiting for a capacity upgrade, you could definitely do worse.
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