Has anyone Tried the Seagate IronWolf NAS Internal Hard Drives? 8TB’s or Higher in their system,
and if so, what do you think of them and how well do they work for you?
I have not used this specific drive but have used both Segate and Wester Digital drives in my NAS and have had more drive failures with the Segate so as they fail I have been switching them out to Wester Digital. I only have one left out of the 9 drives I have. I only use 4 TB at this time as the larger the drive the tighter the tolerances get which can lead to more drive issues.
I use IronWolf NAS drives in my NAS. Had 2 8-TB drives in it for my media for about 2 years now. Recently upgraded to 2 16-TB for my media, moving the 8’s over to a misc-data storage pool. Haven’t had any errors or failures, but 2 years is kind of a small time-frame to measure success.
FYI, I have never had a drive fail on me in my life. Our family has been kind of lucky. We aren’t sure if its because we replace them too fast for them to fail, or we just don’t put enough wear on them.
- The brand is not that important. All brands have suitable and not so suitable models on offer. If you want to know if certain drive models or brands have a higher “tendency” to die earlier, look at Backblaze Hard Drive Stats
- Only use hard drives in a NAS which are specified for NAS or Datacenter usage
- If you use any type of hard drive array (no matter if it’s simple “pooling” or RAID or Windows storage spaces or XFS/ZFS), avoid all hard drive models which use “shingled magnetic recording” (SMR).
- If you build a drive array, try to source hard drives from different retailers, and/or different production dates/charges. This lowers the chance somewhat that all drives in the array reach their end-of-life at the same time. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing a third drive dying during a RAID rebuild/resilvering.
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They’re a solid choice but are louder than the WD Red Plus (main competitor)… the arm clicks a lot more on the Seagate drive. There’s several posts in server threads asking “is this noise normal” for the drives.
The usual advice is to buy whichever is cheaper when it’s time to buy as those two brands are pretty equitable otherwise. There are some data horder forums that go into depth on getting the most storage for your buck but those two product lines are usually the “go to” for NAS drives.
Been using the Seagate Exos X series. So far so good. Found them on Amazon and costs were in the same ballpark as other drives. All the warrantees have been honored as 5-years when I have registered the drives.
My experience with WD Reds has been decent as well (before SMR fiasco).
My experience is that the “brand” of the drives does not matter much and the “level” within that brand matters even less.
In general a top end hard drive will not last longer than lower level drives. Also “speed” does not matter much for Plex or Emby as the kind of “processing” done in those programs is not at all “disk intensive.”
The one thing I would strongly recommend is never ever buy a hard drive from the first manufacturing run. Let the drives run in the wild for a while before investing in them. I always recommend waiting at least a year after a drive is released before making a purchase.
I’m about six months into Iron Wolfs and have no complaints thus far. QNAP compatibility allows for a little more diagnostic stats than other drives.
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Ditto @OttoKerner
Synology does the same for IronWolfs too which was why I picked them up myself. It’s a useful consideration for sure.
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I’ve had nothing by good experiences with Seagate Iron Wolf NAS drives over the last 5 to 6 years, using 6TB and 8TB drives, and although I have a single 14TB drive that I use occasionally to backup my content, I haven’t yet had any issues so far…
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Two synology NAS that mirror each other. Both have seven Western Digital 14TB Ultrastar DC HC530. They are down to about $250 each now and work just fine.
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Indeed, good to know, thanks for the Nfo.
Thanks guys/gals for the input, much appreciated. If they didn’t cost an arm and a leg to upgrade 25 of them I’d be happier, now I just need to find a fire sale 
(The Joys Of a 200 TB system)
Quick question that I think is relevant to the topic, what do you all use for backup? Just a RAID type with redundancy? A second copy of the data? Nothing at all?
My content is on 2x RAID10 arrays, so fairly redundant, but I also take a copy of the content onto another very large single drive that’s in a caddy. I was trying to take a copy once every month, but unfortunately its been a good few months since I’ve done a copy, so really should.
But for Plex itself, I use Veritas Backup Exec to backup the ProgramData location every 3 hours, and also use Veritas System Recovery to take a full image of the OS drive once a week, with incrementals every day.
Some might say that’s overkill, but at least I know I will be able to recover the “machine itself” to any point in time I choose.
Media backup…
I gave up on a RAID5 after a new power supply install fried all the drives in a single smoke burst. Now I do not use a RAID at all. Instead I backup the media to a series of standard internal drives. These drives are connected one at a time via an single external USB3 to SATA adapter. The backup drives are then stored offsite (at friend’s house). I refresh the drives occasionally depending on how much media has been added to the server.
The hard part of this strategy is keeping things in sync, especially for media items that get upgraded (DVD to Blur-ay for example) and for TV series. I usually do a full backup refresh (delete backups and then backup originals again) of all the media to ensure everything is resynced about once or twice a year. Otherwise, I do incremental backups of newly modified/added media, but this creates copies of media files that have been upgraded since last backup.
I have one Synology RAID5 as my primary data storage. I have a second Synology RAID5 that is synced to the first with rsync and all it does is mirror the first in real time. Once a month I back up everything to external USB Hard drives using third party GoodSync. I have less than 40tb so the manual backup doesn’t take that long since it is just adding new items and replacing changed items. It is still spread out over 9 drives though.
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