Seagate IronWolf ST10000VN0008 10 TB

Guardians of the gigabyte galaxy

In 2016, one of the leading players in the storage market, Seagate, carried out a radical update of its lineup, which was united into the Seagate Guardian virtual team. The updated line includes ordinary consumer HDD Seagate BarraCuda, designed for Seagate SkyHawk video surveillance systems and IronWolf helium-filled drives designed for home NAS systems. It is the latter that we will talk about today.

AgileArray adaptive firmware for NAS servers

The “iron wolf” feature was an increased operational load by the standards of NAS servers (they promise 180 TB per year) and the use of AgileArray adaptive firmware, which, using a two-plane balancing mechanism, improves drive stabilization, increases speed and reduces power consumption in a RAID array. Simply put, it minimizes the mutual influence of several drives on each other. To solve the same problem, IronWolf uses rotational vibration sensors. And to reduce energy consumption, Seagate has equipped the hard drive with the EPC software package, which, if necessary, can reduce the activity of electronic components, park heads, slow down the spindle speed, and even turn off the engines. As you can see, the set of specifications is noticeably different from other capacious HDDs that are designed for use in conditional server data centers.

Fast and loud

Like the BarraCuda Pro, the IronWolf 10TB hard drives are based on seven 1.4TB platters and spin at 7200rpm. In everyday usage scenarios, it demonstrates high speeds (sequential write up to 250 MB / s), and a fast 256 MB cache reduces speed drops during long copies. The only negative is that due to the high speed of rotation of the plates, the IronWolf can hardly be called quiet: in idle time, the noise is slightly higher than the background noise, during active work it is already much more noticeable, although it does not go beyond the thresholds of the comfort zone.