Recently, we took a long, hard look at the Seagate Exos M 30TB and walked away very impressed with what it has to offer for the modern Enterprise consumer. The key words in that sentence are Enterprise Consumer, whose near-line storage requirements only bare a passing resemblance to S/MB’s File Server / Network Attached Storage Server needs. One could even argue that about the only overlap is in the fact that, much like the Enterprise nearline niche, the growth of storage demand is not ‘fast’… it is downright exponential. From high-res content produced by creative teams to the constant file exchanges within businesses and home offices, storage needs are outpacing nearly every other aspect of IT infrastructure. What once passed for “good enough” storage capacity now feels like the resemblance to an ice-cream cone in a Texas summer – a nasty mess running down your arm that you have to clean up ASAP. Thankfully, Seagate has been hard at work satisfying the S/MB and home user’s specific needs with (pardon the nerdy pun) laser like focus for years now. More importantly, they recently released their IronWolf Pro 30TB.
Make no mistake. While it is indeed true that the $550’ish (USD) asking price is slightly more palatable than the Exos M 30TB’s $600 (i.e. 1.83 vs 2.0 cents per GB), this does not mean it is inferior. One can expect to find the same 10 3TB “super lattice” platters. Offering a whopping (and scary if you don’t do backups in addition to RAID) six additional TB of capacity compared to the last generation. The same Plasmonic Writer heads. The same Gen 7 Spintronic Reader. The same controller (Seagate in-house SoC). The same 512MB of onboard RAM cache. Heck, arguably a better 5-year warranty as it features the same 550TB/year workload rating but ups the ante via IronWolf Pro’s three full years’ worth of free data recovery (albeit good for only one use). Mix in lower power consumption (8.3W vs 9.5W) and not only do they run cooler than their Exos M brethren… but they have an even more impressive wattage per TB of storage rating of only 0.277W (versus Exos M 30TB’s excellent 0.32watts per TB). Thus, on paper, there is a lot to like – and boy, do we mean a lot to like.
However. With all that said. S/MB purchasing agents and home consumers interested in mega-capacity drives may not be as cynical and jaded as their Enterprise brethren… that is not the same as saying they are naïve; rather, they still are very pessimistic by nature, especially when such massive gains in a single generation sound almost too good to be true. Needless to say, the number one question that most will ask when they read about this nifty new NAS-oriented drive is simple: What’s the Catch? Now… that… that is the Billion Dollar question we will endeavor to answer. The short answer is firmware. Radically different firmware that has radically different priorities – including lower power consumption – than the rip snortin’ Exos M series. Needless to say, this is one of the most interesting model we have seen in a long, long… long time!
