The Seagate IronWolf Pro is ideal for small businesses leveraging NAS devices. The drive comes with an impressive 12TB of capacity. Aside from being able to store more data, the drive also comes with AgileArray technology ensuring its availability, reliability, and RAID and power usage optimization. The Pro version offers several benefits over the non-Pro version such as the support for more drive bays, a longer mean time between failures, and better optimization for multi-users. The Seagate IronWolf Pro 12TB is perfect for small to medium sized companies that want to increase their capacity while maintaining performance and not expanding their footprint. IronWolf Health Management in compatible NAS systems continuously helps to safeguard the health of your data 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. Seagate's IronWolf comes in eight different capacities, and that's not counting the IronWolf Pro lineup. Seagate only uses helium with the two highest capacities, while the 6TB to 12TB models are the only drives with a 7,200-RPM spindle speed. Those models also have the best UBER (uncorrectable bit error) rating. Rotational vibration (RV) sensors are the biggest dividing line for the IronWolf series. The 3TB, 2TB, and 1TB drives don't come with RV sensors, which can hamper performance in a large array.

In the following section of this review, we will show the 12TB Seagate IronWol Pro’s performance in both iSCSI and CIFS configurations. Seagate supplied StorageReview with eight samples of their new NAS HDDs, which we configured in RAID6. I also read the article twice, there are a bunch of affirmations that I completely disagree with, it's not even a different point of view, it's just a point of view based of presenting a situation and a reality in a given time (example Seagate increased product quality, but prices also shot up). It's always the same thing, prices go up to get the executives bigger bonuses, nothing else. That being said, there are fortunately other competitors in the market. Drive balance with Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors manages multi-bay vibration for long-term consistent performance and reliability With standard deviation, the IronWolf Pro came in second on iSCSI with 406.74ms read and 1,867.41ms. With CIFS, the Pro drive came in second in reads with 620.38ms and third in writes with 1,903.27ms.Seagate designed its AgileArray technology to provide a better user experience. Here's how the company describes the feature set: In 4k average latency, the IronWolf Pro hit 392.41ms read and 416.22ms write putting it in first and second place. In CIFS we see the same placement with 805.65ms read and 426.74ms write. Looking at max 4k latency we see the IronWolf Pro drop to last in read speeds with 4,067.6ms in iSCSI and 4,945.7ms in CIFS. Write performance was overall better with 17,231ms iSCSI and 16,771ms CIFS.

We're focusing on the 12TB IronWolf, but the 10TB model tags along for the review. Both share the same performance specifications. The four high-capacity 7,200-RPM models provide 210 MB/s of throughput. The remaining four drives deliver 180 MB/s of throughput due to their 5,400-RPM spindle speeds. Features In our throughput test measuring 4K random performance the Seagate IronWolf Pro landed second overall in iSCSI performance with 651 IOPS read (more or less tied with the non-Pro version’s 652 IOPS) and 631 IOPS write. For CIFS the Pro drive score first in reads with 317 IOPS and second in writes with 611 IOPS. AgileArray also features optimized power management that provides a faster response time while also reducing power consumption. Pricing, Warranty & Endurance RAID performance optimized - maximizes responsiveness and uptime with NAS-aware Error Recovery ControlThe features go beyond the specification sheet. For instance, Seagate attaches the spindle to both the top and bottom of the case to improve stability. The drives also support the ATA-8 streaming command set for increased performance with large sequential transfers. The technology allows the IronWolf to handle up to 64 data streams simultaneously. Seagate continues to add features to the IronWolf product family by working with partners to offer advanced NAS monitoring services with the IronWolf Health Management application. Several popular NAS companies, like Asustor and Synology, have already released firmware upgrades that support the advanced IronWolf management and reporting features.