Seagate IronWolf 510 1.92TB SSD Review

Seagate's IronWolf 510 has been designed to meet the needs of SSD caching duties in NAS devices. In the past, that meant losing one or more of the main storage bays to allow SSD drives to be fitted to handle the caching. More recently some NAS manufacturers have taken to adding M.2 slots to the motherboards of a NAS.

At first, these slots only supported SATA drives but now support the NVMe architecture, and it's to these NAS units that the IronWolf 510 is aimed at. If your NAS doesn't come with onboard M.2 slots but does support add-in SSD NVMe expansion cards via a PCIe slot, then the drive should work in these too.

The IronWolf 510 range is made up of four capacities; a 240GB entry model, 480GB, 960GB and finally the flagship 1.92TB drive. At the heart of the drive is a Phison PS5012-E12DC controller (designed for enterprise) which looks after Kioxia BiCS3 64-layer 3D TLC NAND.

Seagate rate the Sequential read/write performance of the 1.92TB IronWolf as up to 3,150MB/s and 850MB/s respectively. When tested with the ATTO benchmark, our review sample produced figures of 3200MB/s and 923MB/s for read and writes, respectively. It was a similar story with our own Sequential tests, with figures of 3463.72MB/s for reads and 1087.18MB/s for writes.

4K random read performance is stated as up to 290,000 IOPS (QD32 8 threads) while writes are up to 27,000 IOPS (QD32 8 threads). Using our 4-threaded tests we saw a peak figure of 277,824 IOPS for reads and 164,129 IOPS for writes.

If you are going to use an SSD for cache duties in a 24×7 multi-user NAS environment, it needs some serious endurance and the IronWolf 510 certainly has that. The drive supports one drive write per day (DWPD) for the duration of the 5-year warranty, has an MTBF of 1.8M hours and a huge TBW rating of 3,500TB. The drive also supports Seagate's IronWolf Health Management technology (on compatible NAS devices) and comes with 2-year of data rescue services included.

We found the 1.92TB version of the IronWolf 510 for £363.60 (inc VAT) on Span.com HERE.

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Pros

• Fast read speeds.
• Endurance.
• Data rescue service.

Cons

• Pricey.

KitGuru says: Designed for use as a 24/7 cache drive in NAS devices, the IronWolf 510 offers the very high endurance that its intended environment demands.

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