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

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.

We would understand if the IronWolf Pro name is more recognizable and catchy to you than Exos, which is the enterprise counterpart for the Pro model. The former instills a certain sense of reliability, and this is backed by Seagate’s health monitoring and complimentary data recovery services. The IronWolf Pro also often comes in at a lower price, which only sweetens the deal.

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

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

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(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.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(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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• 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 to 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