CONCLUSION

   After testing the IronWolf 10TB HDD it’s quite clear that Seagate aims to change the naming of their products to something more “aggressive” and consumer friendly (perhaps also to attract more gamers?) since at least in terms of performance we’re talking about roughly the same drive as the NAS HDD we reviewed a while back (however that was the 8TB model). So once again performance is very high and just like in the past even slightly higher than what Seagate advertises in the specifications of the drive. What I really liked however about the IronWolf HDD was neither its excellent performance nor its very good endurance numbers (all pretty much identical to that of the NAS HDD) but rather the material used for the enclosure since even after we ran all our tests the drive was cold enough to touch (that’s quite hard with regular drives). This may not seem important at first but less external temperature means that using 8 of those drives inside a NAS will raise system temperatures a lot less compared to using 8 regular models (and that is quite important). Finally thanks to power consumption optimization the IronWolf 10TB uses much less power compared to the NAS HDD 8TB (6.8W vs 9W average) so that’s a really good bonus.

   The arrival of 10TB drives means people can now fit up to 100TB of data inside 10 drives a total of 20TB more compared to the previous 8TB models. Traditionally however the highest capacity drives don’t come cheap and with a current price set at USD448.99 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and 462Euros inside the EU (Amazon.co.uk) the IronWolf 10TB model is not for everybody. Not everyone however needs 10TB per drive and since the Seagate IronWolf 10TB performs great, has very good endurance numbers and is covered by a 3-year limited warranty we can’t really deny giving it our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Build Quality (180WRL / 1 Million Hours MTBF)
- Excellent Performance
- 256MB Cache
- 10TB's Capacity
- Temperatures / Noise Levels / Power Consumption
- Enclosure Material (Low Temperatures)
- 3 Year Limited Warranty

CONS

- Price (For Some)