The latest capacity of the Seagate IronWolf Pro line is a solid addition to the company’s Guardian Series. This NAS-specific drive gives users the highest capacity possible at relatively inexpensive price tag, while results from our performance charts reaffirm that the line is a good choice for SOHO, SME markets and creative professionals. Though it has many of the same features as the non-Pro line, the IronWolf Pro offers some expanded specs including its support of up to a 24-bay storage device (compared to 8 bays for the non-Pro version) and 1.2 million hours MTBF (compared to 1 million MTBF for the non-Pro version). Our next test shifts focus from a pure 8k sequential 100% read/write scenario to a mixed 8k 70/30 workload. This will demonstrate how performance scales in a setting from 2T/2Q up to 16T/16Q. In CIFS, the 16TB IronWolf Pro started at 582 IOPS while ending at a leading 1,415 IOPS in the terminal queue depths. In iSCSI, we saw a range of 395 IOPS to 571 IOPS.

Actively protect your NAS with IronWolf Health Management focusing on prevention, intervention, and recovery. There are many data points to go over in the specifications that explain why Seagate offers three NAS-optimized models. We will be starting with the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro from the Guardian Series of consumer and prosumer products.

Seagate technically has four separate families for its best NAS drives. There’s Seagate IronWolf and IronWolf Pro, which I will be explaining right here. But there’s also Exos and SkyHawk for serious enterprise-grade storage and surveillance, respectively.

Overall, the Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB NAS HDD is a reliable NAS drive that features great performance in specific configurations, while its massive capacity gives users the (budget-friendly) flexibility they need to grow as their data requirements expand. In standard deviation, the 16TB IronWolf Pro showed reads and writes of 619.791ms and 1335.448ms in iSCSI, respectively, and 53.92ms and 1746.24ms in CIFS.Seagate was able to go with the conventional perpendicular magnetic recording (CMR/PMR) technique with these drives, so it doesn't employ the more exotic recording technologies. These types of drives perform better, but it’s also possible to use multi-actuator technology (offering independent data paths) to boost performance and density.

Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks, as well as widely-published values such as max 4K read and write speed and 8K 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise drives. Range of capacities up to 16TB. More capacity options means more choices that will fit within the budget. Seagate provides a scalable solution for any NAS use-case scenario. The larger the drive, the higher the data transfer rate in general; Seagate quotes a 7.8% increase going from 12TB to 18TB, small but not-so-negligible. The numbers we recorded in our benchmark are unambiguous; this is a very, very fast hard disk drive when used as external storage.

But I think the fact the 16TB drive arrives so soon after the 12TB Ironwolf and with WD Red still seeming too invested in 10TB ( talk of a 12TB imminent though), can only mean that we will see 16TB Seagate EXOs, Skyhawk and Barracuda very soon indeed.