After some of Seagate’s partners began to take pre-orders on its yet-to-be-announced Exos 18 hard drive for datacenters and enterprises, the company officially unveiled another HDD featuring a 18TB capacity.
The IronWolf Pro 18TB is designed for enterprise-grade NAS that require high capacity, reliability, and 24/7 availability.
At a high level, Seagate’s IronWolf Pro HDDs for enterprise NAS rely on the same hardware as Exos HDDs as they work in similar environments, but feature some different optimizations on the firmware level to ensure consistent performance in RAID environments for multiple users as well as are rated for a 300TB/year workload.
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Being designed for systems with up to 24 bays, IronWolf Pro drives are outfitted with the same reliability features as the Exos, including a dual-attached motor and RV sensors to guarantee steady performance.
18TB for enterprise NAS
The Seagate IronWolf Pro 18TB is based on conventional magnetic recording (CMR, which in the current case is represented by a combination of PMR and TDMR) and is equipped with nine platters, a 7200 RPM motor as well as a 256MB cache buffer. Like other leading-edge HDDs, the new unit is helium filled.
When it comes to performance, the IronWolf Pro 18TB is rated for an up to 260MB/s sustained transfer rate as well as a 4.16ms average latency. As for power consumption, the drive is rated for up to 8W average operating power as well as 5.2W idle power.
Seagate’s IronWolf Pro 18TB HDD will be available for sale later this month at an MSRP of $608.99. The drive has already been validated by such leading makers of NAS as Asustor and QNAP.
In addition to its new NAS HDDs, Seagate also introduced new IronWolf Pro 125 and IronWolf 125 SATA NAS-optimized SSDs. The drives are designed to work for 24/7 and offer write endurance of 0.7 – 1 drive write per day (DWPD) over a five-year warranty period. The SSDs are priced at $62.99 ~ $944.99 depending on the capacity and performance.
