Why Seagate Barracuda Pro, IronWolf Pro and Exos 7E8 cost almost the same?

[Lapsio]

I started looking for drives and couldn't decide between Barracuda Pro and IronWolf Pro for my workstation (intended use RAID1, DAS). So after a while I decided - screw it I'll just get Exos it's gonna be more expensive but at least it'll be top of the line.

 

But actually it also costs the same...

 

I see following prices (incl 23% tax): 

ST4000NE001 (IronWolf Pro 4TB) : 195$

ST4000NM000A (Exos 7E8 4TB SATA) : 205$

ST4000DM006 (Barracuda Pro 4TB) : 217$

 

And I'm not sure now if Barracuda Pro is such superb HDD beating Exos enterprise HDDs or something gone really wrong with pricing of those drives... Anyone knows what are MSRP prices of them? Is it just the same drive rebranded 17 times? On Newegg price differences are even more hardcore 150$ for Exos and Ironwolf Pro vs almost 200$ for Barracuda Pro

[BryanNichols10]

Well the Iron Wolf Pros are NAS drives so they are designed for 24-7 use doing large file read and writes. 

 

Barracuda pros are more daily driver kind of things so they are more designed for use in a desktop workstation. Also I think the pros come with data recovery and have higher read and write speeds. They also spin at 7200 rpm where the standard barracudas spin at 5400 rpm outside of 1 and tb models 

 

I'm not sure about the Exos, but I know the Iron Wolfs and Barracuda pros are definitely for different things. Where I am, Amazon has a barracuda pro 4 tb for $175 with an Iron wolf of 4tb as $104

[Lapsio]

2 minutes ago, BryanNichols10 said:

Well the Iron Wolf Pros are NAS drives so they are designed for 24-7 use doing large file read and writes. 

 

Barracuda pros are more daily driver kind of things so they are more designed for use in a desktop workstation. Also I think the pros come with data recovery and have higher read and write speeds. They also spin at 7200 rpm where the standard barracudas spin at 5400 rpm outside of 1 and tb models 

 

I'm not sure about the Exos, but I know the Iron Wolfs and Barracuda pros are definitely for different things. Where I am, Amazon has a barracuda pro 4 tb for $175 with an Iron wolf of 4tb as $104

I'm referring to IronWolf Pro. Not "regular" IronWolf. Both IronWolf Pro and Barracuda Pro are 7k2 rpm drives and seem to have the same WRL, the same cache, both have data recovery services, the same sequential speed, the same warranty. IronWolf additionally has AgileArray system helping drive work in RAID systems up to 24 bay and IronWolf Health Management - not available for Barracuda Pro.

 

Exos iirc doesn't have data recovery services but has even better RAID related features, even higher mtbf etc.

[Lapsio]

At this point my blind guess is that Barracuda as meant-to-be standalone drive may have more advanced data correction mechanisms and failsafes while IronWold and Exos as meant-to-be-raid drives can just dump when they encounter some error since by definition there's dozen of them to recover data from.

 

But If someone has better idea I'd love to know something more about that

[Lapsio]

I got response from support that Ironwolf Pro is most suitable for my use case so I guess I'll just accept that fact ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Samfisher]

Exos IIRC just has even more vibration sensors and ways to counter it, it's why it doesn't have a maximum of how many drives it can be next to in a storage bay.  Also longer warranty and just overall sturdier.