Seagate Exos vs. Ironwolf

[seagate_surfer]

11 hours ago, GodAtum said:

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

One for the other, if endurance really is something important then I would go for Exos and especially if I can find it at a great price.

[hunchi]

Interesting discussion! I currently have four 10 TB Ironwolfs in a QNAP NAS and am disappointed by both, their endurance and the "feature" SHM - Seagate Health Management.

One Drive has several SMART warnings in the NAS (and also when checked on a separate device with 3rd party software). However: SHM shows no errors. I don't know whether I should find that reassuring or worrying? Another of the four drives failed after 4 months only showing an I/O Error in the NAS. No SHM warning / indication before it failed at all. However checking it externally with Seagates OEM tool (Seatools) shows no error and a 100% healthy disk. I would be suprised if the fault is with the NAS - other HDDs work in that specific slot without any problem...

 

Anyhow...wondering whether to switch to Exos X14 now. The additional warranty and higher endurance seem much more useful to me when comparing it to a SHM feature that I can't trust.

[Bigbird67]

I bought 2 of the Seagate Exos X16 14TB Drive's for my QNAP TS-563 5-bay NAS. I had 5- 6tb Ironwolf pro and prior to that had 5 3tb WD red Drives in it. all of the drive reported  smart errors. I am convinced that it is the QNAP device as I switched to the Synology 1621+ and used the 14tb and the 6tb drives with zero errors. I created 2 drive pools and tested the data transfer speeds across both pools. the EXOS drive were 24% faster before adding the NVME cache pool and 34% after the cache pool. Which are intel 256gb  drives in raid 1 for read/write. Also the 14tb Exos drive on Newegg and amazon were approx. $6-12 cheaper than the same ironwolf drives as the ironwolf drive were not in stock at the time. Looking forward to 5 yrs of greaat performance at least out of these Drives. 

[Jisagi]

After more than a year, I was finally ready to buy the drives I asked for back then. I settled with 6x Exos 8TB drives which arrived today, but sadly I had to send them back right away. They sold me "china warranty only" products, which is even marked on the drive itself. After some talk with the seller and the seagate support, I sent them back the same day, because nobody could guarantee a replacement when a drive dies within the 5 years warranty.

 

After some quick googeling, I found a few people having the exact same "problem", albeit in diffrent regions of the world. For me its a china product for the german market, which was confusing, even for the seagate support, why an official (re)seller sold me such drives.

 

A question for everyone still reading this (old) thread: Did anyone have the same problem? Did it happen with an Exos (enterprise) drive, or maybe even with a non entperprise (ironwolf, barracuda, ...) drive?

 

Let's hope the seller can solve the issue at hand, so I can finally finish my long awaited home server project

[Asklepios]

Sorry for jumping in the topic.
I was searching for a couple of new 8TB hard drives, and I noticed the Exos 7E8 (specifically the model ST8000NM000A) being cheaper than a "normal" Ironwolf.
I already own several Ironwolf drives (and older NAS series) and a few WD Red, but it would be the first time for me to buy an enterprise drive.
Since there are so many different kinds, each of them for different purposes, I was asking myself if such drive would be ok for a more "generic use", since I'm definitely not so familiar with them. I would use them inside of a machine running Unraid, and mostly used for storage of media files (5GB+ each). Due to the "enterprise class reliability" I was also considering using one of those as my parity drive, since it's by far the drive with the highest number of I/O (I'm currently using an Ironwolf drive, but it's getting a bit old).
Can anyone give me his advice? (reading the whole topic I think @seagate_surfer would probably be the most knowledgeable source)

@JisagiI live in Germany too (even though I'm not German), and I would buy those disks on Amazon (sold by Amazon itself), in case I will let you know what will they send me.

[Jisagi]

3 hours ago, Asklepios said:

@JisagiI live in Germany too (even though I'm not German), and I would buy those disks on Amazon (sold by Amazon itself), in case I will let you know what will they send me.

I received the second btach of harddrives yesterday and again chinese ones. I again sent them back, but this to be credited. the seller was Mindfactorey, so not some small random shop, but after talking to their support again, they are just not able to guarantee what kind of drive one recives.

I gladly found a local shop which can source an older model of the same drive for more or less the same price, but 100% with warranty valid in germany/europe.

 

About the enterprise drives in general: What I personally want from the enterprise drives, is the 5 year warranty. I want a NAS campable drive, so the ironwolf or enterprise ones are the one I looked for. If the price of a 5 year warranty drive is the same or even less than the other model with 3 years warranty, the choice is easy. You obviously don't have to go seagate, I just personally had good a experience with their drives so far. I do have drives from other vendors, but seagate had the best offer for a pretty good price compared to let's say WD and their RED lineup.

[Asklepios]

@JisagiJust wanted to let you know that I bought a couple of those drives from Amazon (article code B07SW18G1K), and they are "regular" drives for European market. I even checked the S/N on the Seagate warranty page and everything is fine.
Actually the drives have been sent from Italy (fun fact, I'm Italian), and I paid € 202 each, even though that very same code was sold for € 330 on Amazon Italy, and I am sure they're exactly the same because those were the very last two pieces available, and the very moment I bought them, they got labeled as "not in stock" on both the German and Italian websites.
As of today I bought several WD HDD and many Seagate ones, all of them from Italy (as in the end I can count also these two as bought from Italy), and never had or heard any problem about products that were supposed to be for the Chinese market. Don't know if that is a problem just in Germany for some reason...

[AngeEinstein]

@seagate_surfer Is there a difference in reliability between Barracuda and Exos drives when it comes to start-stop counts? I think a server drive might not be optimised for frequent start-stop cycles like in a desktop environment.

[95Lulu]

Exos x18 vs irownwolf pro in 2021? 

 

Ps. After reading all those comments. Thanks for the articles and suggestions

 

Also in Denmark for some reason the Exos tends to be a bit cheaper than the Ironwolf / Pro

[Kingbasa]

uff i know this thread is basically super old

 but i hope a simple question for my setup 

i got 3 exos hdd's for my storage
do i have any downside to the ironwolfs ?

if i understood everything right
the exos should be the better NAS hdd's 

my setup is a server with openmedia vault and plex

and some virtual mashines and webserver and everything based on a proxmox server

[Niklos]

On 1/24/2022 at 3:55 PM, Kingbasa said:

i got 3 exos hdd's for my storage
do i have any downside to the ironwolfs ?

 

EXOS are louder... I think that is it... There are better driver overall.