Seagate IronWolf NAS 18TB HDD and 510 M.2 Review

Introduction

Reliable storage is one of those things in life that it’s easy to become blasé about. Just as you don’t really care about the NCAP rating of your car until you have an accident, so we all skim over the Mean Time Before Failure and daily write allowances of our storage mediums so we can get on with the business of finding our how fast it goes, how big it is, and how small a dent it will make in our wallets.

That’s until you lose a drive, then suddenly that long warranty and reliability becomes of paramount importance. Just like we’re all told to back up our data and don’t, it’s only when things go really wrong that you realise why you should have listened. Heck we here at OC3D recently lost one of the drives in our server and, despite rebuilding the RAID array, still lost all that was written this month because the last backup was at the beginning of the month.

Seagate have been part of the storage world for longer than we care to remember. My old 286 that ran at a dizzying 16 MHz had a Seagate drive in it, they’ve been doing it for that long. Naturally when you’ve been around that long you have a lot of products aimed at the enterprise market, where storage is mission critical and can be the difference between having a business and not. Just imagine for a moment that all your hard drives died at once and you lost everything that wasn’t backed up somewhere and how that might impact your life. Then imagine that your roof and food as well as the homes and nutrition of a workforce would be lost too. Suddenly reliability becomes a key desire.

The IronWolf range is aimed very much at those of you with a penchant for keeping lots of data and a wish that after a catastrophic power failure you still had that data. It’s not for those who want blazing performance. Slow would be too strong a word, but slow and steady is the theme here. Perhaps ‘relentless and fast enough’ is better. With both an 18TB HDD for long term storage and their IronWolf 510 M.2 drive in 1.92TB capacity to ferry that data from your system to the NAS we’ve got two very different products to look at today.

Technical Specifications

IronWolf 18TB

IronWolf 510