Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB HDD Review

Rating: 8.0.

Seagate's latest flagship drive in the NAS-focussed IronWolf Pro range provides a massive 20TB of storage capacity. It's been designed to cater for the needs of 24×7 multi-bay NAS environments. Going for over £500 however, is it worth a purchase?

Seagate's 20TB IronWolf Pro (ST20000NE000) is a CMR drive using Helium technology which allows for 10 x 2TB platters together with 20 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 and uses 256MB of cache. Seagate quote an official maximum transfer rate of 285MB/s while the average latency is quoted at 4.16ms.

Seagate quote power ratings for the 20TB IronWolf Pro as 1W standby, 1W sleep, 5.5W average idle and 7.7W average active. The standby and sleep figures are less than the previous 18TB IronWolf Pro (1.25W for each) and while the average idle power consumption of the new drive has risen from 5.2W to 5.5W, at 7.7W the operating power has dropped from the 8W of the 18TB drive.

The official workload rating of the drive is 300TB/year with an MTBF of 1.2M hours which is the same as the previous 18TB flagship drive and Seagate back the drive with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 20TB.
• Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm.
• No. Of Heads: 20.
• No. Of Platters: 10 (2 x 2TB).
• Cache: 256MB.
• Recording Method: Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR).
• Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
• Form Factor: 3.5in.
• Dimensions: 26.11 x 101.85 x 146.99mm.
• Drive Weight: 670g.

Firmware Version: EN01.

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