Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB Review

Rating: 8.0.

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.

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