Seagate IronWolf vs IronWolf Pro

[dwchan69]

Is IronWolf Pro really worth the extra cost? I am aware that is has 2 more year of warranty and it suppose to support higher vibration tolerance in a multi drive environment, but wonder if this more market than real world metric?

 

[SweetAndLow]

Is IronWolf Pro really worth the extra cost? I am aware that is has 2 more year of warranty and it suppose to support higher vibration tolerance in a multi drive environment, but wonder if this more market than real world metric?

You're paying for the extra warranty. Just burn your drives in correctly and you probably won't care about the extended warranty.

 

[Heracles]

Here, I am running from the regular Iron Wolf. Had to RMA one drive and it was done very easily. Very happy with it and I do not see the need to pay extra for the extended warranty.

 

[ChrisRJ]

You should also look at the Seagate Exos product line, which is positioned above the Ironwolf pro as the data center product. When I bought my 16 TB drives in September/October 2020 they were cheaper than the Ironwolf (not the Pro).

 

[joeschmuck]

Is IronWolf Pro really worth the extra cost? I am aware that is has 2 more year of warranty

That is really all you are buying as previously stated, 2 more years. If they make it 3 years then odds are they will make it 5 years but some of that depends on how your drives are operated. If you spin them up/down often or make them too hot (most of us here think that 45C is the upper limit for normal drive temps, even if the drive is rated for 60C), so how they are used in general will also affect how long they live.

higher vibration tolerance in a multi drive environment, but wonder if this more market than real world metric?

I wish I had proof of this metric also but I personally feel it's more of a marketing ploy. I'm sure there is some science behind it but that is a moot point if you buy a capacity of 4TB or larger as the RV sensor comes standard for all IronWolf Pro (all sizes) and standard for all IronWolf 4TB or above.

The other factor you left out was rotational speed, this is also important based on your use case. For a general home system then I'd want less than 7200 RPM looking at it from a heat/cooling perspective. If I needed high speed access then the faster RPM is the plan.

 

[JanJurak]

As joeschmuck already mention: Pro hase 5 years guarantee. I am not familiar how reliable this series is, so i went with Pro ones i solve the same dilema few days ago and this desided.

 

[Constantin]

Backblaze had a neat set of articles on this in 2013 that they unfortunately have not updated since. One of them looked at the life expectancy of so-called Enterprise drives vs. consumer drives and found no difference. Granted, the use case at Backblaze is different from most homes but it's a starting point. Similarly, they had a nice set of charts suggesting what we should expect our drive life to be over time. I would not read the world into this data since it's 8 years old, covers disk mechanisms no longer sold, is unlikely to include helium drives, etc. (a lot of those drives were shucked).

Depending on how many drives you've got a hankering for, also consider the cost of the warranty vs. the cost of another drive. Given a choice, it likely makes more sense to have an additional spare on hand rather than pay for the warranty (i.e. number of drives times the marginal cost between Iron Wolf and Iron Wolf Pro). Remember, most drives that die within warranty tend to do so on arrival or when young. That's also why you should torture your drives on arrival with the badblocks test a few times.

Old age deaths usually occur well after the drive is out of warranty, especially if the drive was well-cared for (i.e. good temperatures, no spin-downs, no physical movement, and an expected level of activity).

Also consider that a drive on hand (esp a burnt-in, known-good, but offline) is better security than any warranty an OEM / merchant can give you. Remember the impact of the the Thai floods on the global HDD supply chain in 2011? I do. Under those circumstances, a OEM / vendor can claim force majeure and leave you stranded re: warranty claims.

Helium-filled drives command a premium due to their expected longer life, lower energy costs, and lower heat.

For SOHO use, a 5,900-RPM drive (if it actually spins at that speed) is perhaps a better match, especially if you're dealing with a 1GbE ethernet connection.

 

[dwchan69]

thank you for your inputs, but let me give you more info for my use case. For starters, this is going to be used for my home/lab environment. So technically, it will turn on and stay on. Second, I am going to be using the Fractal Design Define 7 XL case. I plan to start with 8 - 8TB and potentially upgrade to 16 - 8 TB as needed. So one of the thing Seagate pointed out is about the vibration use case where it is more than 8 drives, I should consider to IronWolf Pro. I am not sure how much of that is really true versus just lab data / marketing. Given I am targeting the 8Tb size, neither series will gain me much in term of speed and they both are already running 7200RPM. Noise and few other factors are at par, and the 2 added years warranty will not be my driver as a fail drive is fail drive. What is it to say the IronWolf Pro will not fail in 2 years. I get it is free, but still a pain in term of procurement and replacement

 

[Constantin]

Ok so what is the the $$ delta between the pro vs. the regular? How many extra regular drives can you buy with that difference x8?

 

[dwchan69]

on average $50 per disk

 

[Constantin]

So at $50 a pop times 8 drives, you’re looking at $400 or two regular drives. I’d rather have two spare drives than a warranty for years 3-5 on the 8. See the backblaze article as a starting point re: likely survivor probability for each drive by year of ownership.

as for the drive limits due to vibration, it likely depends on how they are installed. For example, in my Lian Li, the drives are mounted using a silicone washer for each corner. If the case is mounted on something hard, between gravity, the stiffness of the drive cage, and the washer, little is going to rattle the drives.

The NZXt 440 case has much less impressive drive mounting systems. There, the drives are piggy-backed and hard mounted to each other, two at a time to get the required density. (Thanks but no thanks).

some of my drives should be failing by now and yet all of them other than DOA models have been fine so far.