INTRODUCTION

   Due to recent developments in the enterprise grade SSD market by some of the large players (namely Seagate, Samsung, Viking Technology and Nimbus Data) it seems that capacity is no longer an issue (8/30/50/60/100TB SSD models have been released in the last year) and so it may not be very long before we see the very first consumer oriented models with capacities surpassing 2TB. Still although capacity may no longer be an issue it will be a while before prices drop to satisfactory levels (way too long for most consumers) and so until that comes to pass regular HDDs will remain at the top in terms of price/capacity ratio. Last month Seagate updated their Guardian series of 3.5" hard disk drives (BarraCuda/FireCuda/IronWolf/IronWolf Pro/SkyHawk) to also include 14TB models and after one full week of tests our review of the brand new IronWolf Pro (ST14000NE0008) is complete.

  Seagate is the global leader in data storage solutions, developing amazing products that enable people and businesses around the world to create, share and preserve their most critical memories and business data. Over the years the amount of information stored has grown from megabytes all the way to geopbytes, confirming the need to successfully store and access huge amounts of data. As demand for storage technology grows the need for greater efficiency and more advanced capabilities continues to evolve.

   The brand new IronWolf Pro 14TB (ST14000NE0008) is based on the TDMR (Two-Dimensional Magnetic Recording - upcoming 16-18-20TB and above models will feature Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology) technology (made it possible for Seagate to boost area density from 923Gb/in2 to 1077GB/in2) and as expected is very similar to its predecessor the IronWolf Pro 12TB model (ST12000NE0007) so once again Seagate has implemented the same optimizations for use with network attached storage devices (up to 24 bays this time), desktop servers and private cloud storage. Also featured in the brand new IronWolf Pro 14TB model are Seagate's AgileArray technology (includes dual-plane balancing, RAID optimization and advanced power management), Rotational Vibration (RV) mitigation (several RV sensors help maintain high performance in multi-drive NAS enclosures), health management (drive monitoring) and Error Recovery Control. Internal specifications of the helium filled (reduces friction thus boosting reliability and capacity while at the same time reducing weight and power consumption) IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD include 8 platters (each 1.8TB in capacity) that spin at 7200RPM, total of 16 heads and 256MB of DRAM cache. Seagate also covers the IronWolf Pro 14TB with a 5 year limited warranty and a 2-year free subscription to their Rescue Data Recovery service (90% success rate of data recovery) and reports reliability numbers of 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and 300TB/yr. (Terabytes Per Year).