Seagate Exos vs. Ironwolf

[seagate_surfer]

All right! Thanks for the compliments pal! 

[Kilrah]

On 10/2/2019 at 10:43 PM, Kilrah said:

Now the wait... distributor quotes availability on Oct 10th :(

Still waiting, delivery date was bumped to the 18th 

[seagate_surfer]

23 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Still waiting, delivery date was bumped to the 18th 

Oh noooo!!  Fortunately you are very patient!

[Kilrah]

Well, still nothing, and the distributor has sent a "no estimated date, no more backorders" notice, and removed the drive from their website. Seems Seagate is unable to deliver...

That sucks since I'm travelling next week and was supposed to take 2 of the drives with me.

 

 

[seagate_surfer]

Have you tried with different distributors in your country? https://www.seagate.com/where-to-buy/

[Kilrah]

I've got a company and directly ordered from the main distributor, obviously since they don't have any no-one else does...

Just cancelled the exos and ordered ironwolfs instead, they'll be here today.

 

EDIT: They literally arrived a minute after I posted

Edited October 29, 2019 by Kilrah

[seagate_surfer]

9 hours ago, Kilrah said:

I've got a company and directly ordered from the main distributor, obviously since they don't have any no-one else does...

Just cancelled the exos and ordered ironwolfs instead, they'll be here today.

 

EDIT: They literally arrived a minute after I posted

Whoa! That's so cool, love it! 

[Kilrah]

Pretty surprised and happy with the performance, getting about 240MB/s sustained write speed. Thought we'd forever be in the 120-150MB/s range.

Pretty nice to have close to 500MB/s on a 2-drive RAID0

 

Now the downside is that the 2-drive external RAID boxes I have don't seem happy with that drive size. Strangely they're happy to run them both in RAID1 or as independent disks, but not in RAID0 which I need...  Got another on order to test.

 

[seagate_surfer]

22 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Pretty surprised and happy with the performance, getting about 240MB/s sustained write speed. Thought we'd forever be in the 120-150MB/s range.

Pretty nice to have close to 500MB/s on a 2-drive RAID0

 

Now the downside is that the 2-drive external RAID boxes I have don't seem happy with that drive size. Strangely they're happy to run them both in RAID1 or as independent disks, but not in RAID0 which I need...  Got another on order to test.

 

That's unfortunate! What RAID boxes are you using?

[Kilrah]

https://www.raidon.com.tw/RAIDON2016/product.php?id=23

[Kilrah]

Received my new external box. For the record the StarTech S352BU313R works fine with them in RAID0. Now to order a 2nd one...

[seagate_surfer]

On 11/2/2019 at 8:58 PM, Kilrah said:

Received my new external box. For the record the StarTech S352BU313R works fine with them in RAID0. Now to order a 2nd one...

Jump for joy! Not sure what could have been with the other one but glad to hear that this was an easy fix! 

[terroralpha]

On 9/30/2019 at 3:14 PM, seagate_surfer said:

For home use there may not be much difference between one and the other but the Exos unit is better because it is focused on business use, the IronWolf Pro unit has a performance very similar to the enterprise level but it is cheaper and that is why many companies use the Pro version of the Seagate IronWolf (They ussually purchase in bulks), because it is cheaper than Exos but with a very similar endurance, so they can save some bucks per unit and thus making it more profitable. In your specific case, it is not necessary to have the Exos but if you have the money to buy it then go ahead because you will acquire some of the best there is today, however it is not necessary and it would be merely a decision of yours and your personal budget.

 

hello. i just picked up some 16TB exos drives, and they were $100+ cheaper EACH than the ironwolfs and ironwolfs pro on amazon. the overall difference was over $1000 for 8 drives. 

 

was there some sort of a price shift? if what you say is true and the exos are the higher tier drive, the price doesn't make any sense. 

[seagate_surfer]

25 minutes ago, terroralpha said:

 

hello. i just picked up some 16TB exos drives, and they were $100+ cheaper EACH than the ironwolfs and ironwolfs pro on amazon. the overall difference was over $1000 for 8 drives. 

 

was there some sort of a price shift? if what you say is true and the exos are the higher tier drive, the price doesn't make any sense. 

 

Most likely, you found a link with a discounted price, check the serial number on the page and remember that if something goes wrong you always have the option to request RMA: 

• https://www.seagate.com/support/warranty-and-replacements/

The page shows warranty dates based on the manufacturing date but what you have to know is that the warranty actually applies after the purchase date, these dates can be adjusted by contacting customer service. But the important thing is that they appear as valid serial numbers first and then after that you can be certain that you will have %100 the support of Seagate.

[Kilrah]

Here the exos were also about $50 cheaper than the ironwolfs, and that wasn't just a temporary discount... but there was no stock when I needed them, so went with the IW anyway. The IW Pros were like $200 more than the IW, i.e $250 more than the exos which made no sense at all.

[seagate_surfer]

@terroralpha, @Kilrah, Where are you from? Do you think this is a clear example of counterfeit devices? Could you ever buy an Exos? If so, can you send me photos to review it?

[Kilrah]

Switzerland.

 

The IW Pro have fallen back to normal now, but the Exos are still the cheapest.

No counterfeits of course, that's from all the reputable outlets, and even straight from the major distributor of IT equipment in the country.

 

[seagate_surfer]

  

8 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Switzerland.

 

The IW Pro have fallen back to normal now, but the Exos are still the cheapest.

No counterfeits of course, that's from all the reputable outlets, and even straight from the major distributor of IT equipment in the country.

I checked the unit and the model and its revision number, it is a non-self-encrypted standard unit, but I would love to have someone who has bought one of those drives specifically to ask if the serial number is valid. I will ask some colleagues in that market if they know anything about it...

[Kilrah]

Yes it's mentioned as "Standard Model FastFormat".

 

Didn't know there were multiple versions?

 

https://www.alltron.ch/seagate-harddisk-exos-x16-3-5-sata-16-tb-931738

 

EDIT: Yep, 2 versions (with SATA interface), standard and self-encrypting https://www.seagate.com/em/en/enterprise-storage/exos-drives/exos-x-drives/exos-x16/

[seagate_surfer]

6 minutes ago, Kilrah said:

Yes it's mentioned as "Standard Model FastFormat".

 

Didn't know there were multiple versions?

 

https://www.alltron.ch/seagate-harddisk-exos-x16-3-5-sata-16-tb-931738

 

EDIT: Yep, 2 versions (with SATA interface), standard and self-encrypting https://www.seagate.com/em/en/enterprise-storage/exos-drives/exos-x-drives/exos-x16/

Thanks for this data, I will try to find out more about it.

[Jisagi]

I can confirm this price trend here in germany as well. The exact same drives as those @Kilrah posted have the same price spread in Euro. All of them from one of the largest computer etailer here in germany, so no shady ebay sellers or anything either. (This is a price comparison website, so the actual prices are 10-15€, bit the difference between the drives stays the same)

[terroralpha]

i ran the serial numbers of the exos drives i got from newegg (newegg was the seller, not a 3rd party). read serial numbers from the firmware and they check out on seagate's website. i'll have to ask the client if it's OK to share the serial numbers before doing so, but i doubt newegg would sell fake seagate hardware.  

 

literally saved thousands of USD by buying exos over any of the ironwolves (pro or regular) or WD red drives (pro or regular). if these drives were self encrypting i would have not bought them. in the event of another hurricane sandy recovery will be impossible, if we were to need it. this is exactly what i wanted, tons of (relatively) cheap storage with 5 year warranties. 

 

as for the self encrypting EXOS drives, they are still cheaper than ironwolf pro. 16TB models $500 a pop at provantage: https://www.provantage.com/seagate-st16000nm003g~7SEGE1K3.htm 

 

16TB ironwold pro is around $525

[seagate_surfer]

That's fine, as long as the website returns valid data to them, and as long as they can confirm that they can see that the unit information is correct, then we can say that we are on the safe side.

[seagate_surfer]

I couldn't get a definitive answer but this seems to happen sometimes also in the United States. Suppliers will set prices differently at the consumer level, while business-level suppliers will make decisions based service level agreements of larger organizations, since they operate differently, this seems to create a disparity between prices. I would choose the cheapest one I can find if the price is in my range because the units are very good, if the specifications, the warranty and the compatibility make me feel comfortable, I would do it as long as they are brand new. Used hard drives are not like other used parts that can work well, even when they are second-hand ...

[GodAtum]

On 9/30/2019 at 8:14 PM, seagate_surfer said:

For home use there may not be much difference between one and the other but the Exos unit is better because it is focused on business use, the IronWolf Pro unit has a performance very similar to the enterprise level but it is cheaper and that is why many companies use the Pro version of the Seagate IronWolf (They ussually purchase in bulks), because it is cheaper than Exos but with a very similar endurance, so they can save some bucks per unit and thus making it more profitable. In your specific case, it is not necessary to have the Exos but if you have the money to buy it then go ahead because you will acquire some of the best there is today, however it is not necessary and it would be merely a decision of yours and your personal budget.

Current pricing makes the Exos X series more attractive in performance-focused deployments, but you do lose some consumer/prosumer features like two years of free data recovery found on the IronWolf Pro, and advanced disk health monitoring found on both IronWolf and IronWolf Pro series.

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/9101/seagate-16tb-ironwolf-pro-exos-x16-hdd-review/index4.html