Very recently we took a long hard look at Seagate’s premier near-line flagship (for now) series the Exos X24 and walked very impressed. However, as we went over in that review the customized Super-Parity firmware does indeed do things differently. It does so as it is meant for the Enterprise environment with Enterprise grade problems requiring Enterprise grade solutions. The IronWolf Pro series on the other hand is not meant for the (true) Enterprise market. Instead it is intended to fill an online role while housed inside a Network Attached Storage server, device, or even appliance. As such, while you may find the occasional cluster of these woofers in a 4U 90 bay chassis, most likely you will not. Instead you will see them in wolfpacks of anywhere from 2 to 48 drives in Home/SoHo/SMB/Large Business server rooms (even if that ‘server room’ is a fancy way of saying ‘man cave’). With most usage scenarios falling towards the lower end of that scale. As such the new IronWolf Pro 24TB may indeed boast very, very similar hardware as the Exos X line it is (somewhat) based upon, but the firmware is radically different.
Considering this specific model’s MSRP is $480, and the Exos X24’s is also $480 USD, that does bring up a very interesting question. A question that sadly we do get asked way, way too often. That being… is it even worth bothering with an IronWolf Pro when one can be rocking the premium Exos X? After all, the Seagate routinely cull models due to too much overlap and too little buyer enthusiasm in them. So is it possible that the Exos X will do to the IronWolf Pro what the IronWolf Pro did to its younger non-Pro sibling and the BarraCuda line?
Conversely… will the Exos X be EOL’ed in favor of the IronWolf Pro series? After all, on paper there is now very, very little to differentiate one from the other. The same maximum r/w specification of 285MB/s. The same 550TB Total Drive Writes limitation on the warranty. The same 5 year length of warranty. Hell, considering the IronWolf Pro 24 is the same price as the Seagate Exos X24 and yet comes with three free years of data recovery on top of the standard 5 year warranty… every professional worthy of the name will have to at some point defend their beloved Exos X purchase decision. After all, the PHBs at head office are always looking for a way to save a buck and while there are major differences in firmware, there really is not much (on paper) to clearly delineate one from the other.
This is where we, and other professional reviewers, enter the chat. Today we will put the IronWolf Pro 24 through its paces and see what the difference firmware can make. Without giving away too much, it does make a difference and these differences clearly show how good Seagate’s firmware teams are at optimization for radically difference scenarios.
