KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Seagate’s IronWolf Pro range of hard drives have been designed for use in commercial and enterprise NAS devices from 1-bay units all the way up to 24-bay systems. The new flagship of the range is the 14TB drive that has just been launched.
Seagate has just launched a range of 14TB drives covering a wide range of market segments for its Guardian Series; the BarraCuda Pro aimed at the consumer/desktop segment, the surveillance-optimised SkyHawk drive and finally the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives aimed at NAS enclosures.
The 16TB IronWolf Pro uses Helium technology which allows for 8 x 1.75TB platters together with 16 heads to be crammed into a 3.5in format drive with a height of just 26.11mm. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm with a 256MB cache which gives the drive an official transfer rate of 250MB/s while the average latency is quoted at 4.16ms.
Seagate have increased the areal density of the platters from the 923 Gb/in2 of the 12TB IronWolf Pro to 1058 GB/in2 by using narrower tracks. To overcome any errors in accuracy because of these narrower tracks, Seagate have turned to TDMR (Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording) technology. TDMR uses two read elements in the drive head to improve tracking accuracy.
Seagate quote power ratings for the 14TB IronWolf Pro as 0.8W standby, 0.8W sleep, 5.3W average idle and 7.9W average active.
The official workload rating of the drive is 300TB/year with a MTBF of 1.2M hours and Seagate back the drive with a 5 year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 14TB.
Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm.
No. Of Heads: 16.
No. Of Platters: 8.
Cache: 256MB.
Recording Method: Perpendicular.
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
Form Factor: 3.5in.
Dimensions: 26.11 x 101.85 x 146.99mm.
Drive Weight: 690g.
Firmware Version: EN01.
Seagate's IronWolf Pro 14TB is built on a standard 3.5in format but with a thickness of 26.11mm. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and 256MB of cache.
The drive uses Helium technology which enables Seagate to cram eight 1.75TB (areal density of 1058 GB/in2 ) PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) and 16 reading heads into the drive.
The two angled silver units at the ends of the PCB are the rotational Vibration (RV) sensors that protect the drive against any damage caused by the vibration that is set up in the larger multi-bay NAS enclosures.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard.
Other drives
Seagate NAS 8TB
Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB
Seagate IronWolf 10TB
Toshiba N300 8TB
Toshiba P300 3TB
Toshiba X300 6TB
WD Gold 12TB
WD Black 6TB
WD Black 4TB
WD Red 4TB
WD Red 8TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
IOMeter.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
The 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro produced the fastest read score of any mechanical hard drive we have seen to date in CrystalDiskMark. Its write performance isn't as impressive though, falling short of the write performance of the previous 12TB flagship of the IronWolf Pro range.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously.
Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Seagate quote a maximum transfer rate of 250MB/s, a figure we could confirm in the ATTO benchmark. It's not quite as fast as the 12TB BarraCuda Pro and IronWolf Pro drives.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above.
Seagate's latest drive is the fastest we have seen to date in our 4K random test when it comes to read performance, its write performance isn't quite as good.
In our throughput tests the 14TB IronWolf Pro's read performance peaked at 263MB/s at the end of the test run. Peak writes came at the 64KB block mark at 252MB/s, confirming Seagate's official transfer rate of the drive of 250MB/s.
The 14TB IronWolf Pro drive is the fastest mechanical drive we've seen to date in our throughput test with a read score of 263MB/s and 251MB/s for writes.
We tested the 14TB IronWolf Pro with a number of scenario’s that it may face in the real world. The settings for these scenarios are as follows.
File Server
512MB file size, 16KB Block size
80% Read 20% Write 100% Random
I/O queue depth 128
Web Server
1GB file size, 16KB Block size
100% Read 0% Write 100% Random
I/O queue depth 64
Database
2GB file size, 4KB Block size
90% Read 10% Write, 90% Random, 10% Sequential
I/O depth 128
The drive is the fastest HDD we have seen when it comes to our Workload Scenario's with the exception of the database test where the performance drops off dramatically.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.
100GB file
60GB iso image
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.
The drive has no problems dealing with our real life file transfers, breaking 100MB/s for all but the 50GB file folder test.
The demands for data storage are growing and showing no signs of slowing down. While Flash based storage encroaches ever deeper into markets that were once the stronghold of mechanical drives, the one area where spinning disks still reign supreme is in the storage of “cold” and archival data where cost per GB is a more important factor than ultimate performance.
Seagate have just launched a new 14TB flagship capacity across the drive ranges; Barracuda Pro (desktop), SkyHawk (surveillance) and the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro (NAS/RAID) that make up the companies Guardian Series of HDDs. These drives join the 14TB Exos enterprise drive.
The IronWolf and IronWolf Pro models use Seagate's AgileArray Technology for better performance and reliability in NAS environments. AgileArray is a combination of software, hardware and firmware features including Error Recovery Control that prevents RAID drop offs. The effects of drive vibration in large multidrive NAS enclosures have to potential to cause real problems.
To this end the drive uses Seagate's AcuTrac Technology which allows the drive to still function properly even if it's being impacted from vibration from a neighbouring drive. The drive is also fitted with Rotational Vibration (RV) Sensors to reduce vibration in the multi-bay enclosures while Dual Plane Balance ensures the drive is vibration-free and quiet during operation.
The drives firmware has been optimised for multi drive RAID setups including support for the ATA-8 streaming command set which helps to handle the large sequential block transfers of some video files.
Another technology in the IronWolf Pro's armoury to help them survive in multi-disk enclosures is IronWolf Health Management (IHM). Incompatible NAS drives supporting IHM (check on the Seagate website for NAS compatibility) the technology adds another layer of protection by interacting with the NAS OS to display actionable prevention, intervention or recovery options for whatever is affecting the drive’s health.
If all else fails then then IronWolf Pro drives come with 2 year of Seagate’s Rescue Recovery Service included.
We found the 14TB Seagate IronWolf Pro available to pre-order on Overclockers UK for £579.95 HERE
Pros
- Performance.
- 5-year warranty
- NAS technologies.
- Rescue Recovery Service included.
Cons
- Pricey.
Kitguru says: Seagate’s 14TB IronWolf Pro brings some serious storage capacity to NAS users as well as some very useful features for that environment in the shape of the AgileArray technologies. You also get the added benefit of Seagate’s Rescue Recovery Service.
