For a few years now I have been using WD RED NAS hard drives in my DIY NAS NVR. But these are running 24/7 and its only a matter of time before I need to start replacing them one by one.
So I have been researching the various NAS hard drives from WD, Seagate and other top brands. I looked at WD RED vs. Seagate IronWolf drives recently. That’s when I came across the Ironwolf Pro range.
Let’s take a closer look at how the IronWolf differs from the IronWolf Pro.
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IronWolf vs. IronWolf Pro – Comparison Table
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IronWolf vs. IronWolf Pro – Features
The biggest difference between the Ironwolf & Ironwolf Pro is the number of drive bays supported:
- IronWolf is aimed at Home, SOHO and small business NAS drives with up to 8 drive bays.
- IronWolf Pro, on the other hand is for businesses and digital artists who need extremely high performance from their NAS servers with up to 24 drive bays.
Another major difference is the rotational speed. As you can see in the comparison table above, the larger Ironwolf drives from 8 TB and upwards rotate at 7200 rpm but the smaller capacity models run at 5400 or 5900 rpm. But all the IronWolf Pro drives run at 7200 rpm.
Performance
The IronWolf Pro has a much higher rated transfer speed than the IronWolf, as can be seen in the comparison table above.
However in real life, which drive is faster will depend on what type of enclosure or rack you are using.
In a smaller enclosure, the IronWolf may pull ahead whereas in larger enclosures or storage racks, the Pro version will have better performance. This can be attributed to the vibration optimizations of the Pro version.
All IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives utilize write-back caching.
Reliability
Seagate has improved the the workload rating of the Ironwolf Pro drives from 300 TB/year to 550 TB/year. This is a welcome change. However, the standard Ironwolf’s rating remains at 180TB/year. But that doesn’t tell us the full story.
While we may not have specific reliability data for the Seagate Ironwolf and WD RED drives, one cloud storage provider regularly publishes drive failure data for all the drives it uses – Backblaze.
Please note that the Seagate hard drives they use are the Exos variety, not Ironwolf. Still, it gives us some sense of how reliable the Seagate brand is.
Looking at the latest Backblaze data, in general at lower capacities, Seagate seems to have slightly lower reliability. Although do note the sample size is much larger in Seagate’s case for most drive sizes, generally the higher the sample size, the more accurate the data becomes.
Noise
The Ironwolf has a noise level rating of 20-30dB, which is low enough to place the NAS in your living room or in your study.
Not all IronWolf Pro drives are as quiet because the professional audience that the Pro drives target do not really care much about sound levels. But they still stay under a pretty quiet 32 dB level.
VueVille Verdict
The IronWolf is our choice for most home users. If you are using a storage rack or an enclosure with more than 8 bays, go for the IronWolf Pro.
Where to buy
- Buy the IronWolf from Amazon*
- Buy the IronWolf Pro from Amazon*
(* = affiliate link / image source: Amazon Associates Program)
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