If you have already read our review on the Exos M 30TB, the previous pages will give you a sense of DejaVu (all over again)… as the IronWolf Pro 30TB is extremely similar (from a hardware perspective) to the Exos M 30TB. Most of the components on the PCB (basically all but vibration sensors) are the same. The same super-lattice platters is used on both. Both make use of the same r/w tech. They share the same helium-filled technology inside (basically) the same 3.5-inch form-factor chassis. Heck, except for the color (and text on them) the labels between the two lines are also the same.
They are all the same because the days of artificially limiting a given model’s abilities at the physical component level are long gone. These days it makes very, very little sense to run two different production lines, with all the logistical issues and overhead that go along with it, versus having two production lines pump out nearly the same drive that then later diverge when it comes time to slap the populated PCB on it so as to ‘create’ two different drive models. To be fair, that is being a touch simplistic as both then undergo different QA/QC procedures… but the general point remains. This blurring of the product stacks’ lines has been done to keep build costs (and thus MSRP) reasonable. While ensuring Seagate doesn’t guess wrong about product demand and get stuck with a ton of “useless” drives… while being out of stock of the “other” model. Simply yank a PCB, retest, and bam, an Exos becomes a Wolf (or vice versa).
Put another way, the IronWolf Pro is built like a tank as it is built to Enterprise standards. Not consumer-grade anything standards. As such, Seagate’s engineers have been able to not worried about hardware tweaking and instead have focused all their effort on firmware refinement. In previous generations, this different firmware would have a moderate impact on overall performance… but in a pinch, either drive could whistle the tune (so to speak) of the other. With HAMR being in its infancy, those days are relegated to the past, but at some point may make a return; until then, it is not hardware but firmware that has the largest impact on drive performance.
For instance, on paper, the ‘missing’ SuperParity extra ECC should make the IronWolf Pro faster than the Exos M at writes (and possibly reads) but slightly less capable in the data recovery abilities… as SuperParity does come with a good chunk of overhead in both IOPS and added SoC cycles due to its additional ECC nature. In the real world (and on paper for that matter), the IronWolf Pro 30TB is not faster at writes, nor reads, compared to the Exos M 30TB. No one can argue otherwise. It is just a fact.
That is because the firmware has a built-in power limiter that, literally, limits total power consumption… which in turn hard caps overall performance. Especially write performance, but not just write performance. Make no mistake, this limiter is not limiting overall power per se (e.g. “under-volting” in CPU terms); rather, that is just a side effect of it limiting the speed/timing at which the (twenty) Plasmonic Writer’s “Laser” fires. These lasers are, by their very nature, power hogs compared to the old school writer head tech, and by simply increasing the delay in between firing cycles, the amount of power the IronWolf Pro 30TB consumes is less. Noticeably less.
Of course, the downside is that firing slower means write performance is slower. However, that “massive” ~13 percent reduction in power consumption does not equate to a 13% reduction in r/w performance. It is less than that and may not even be noticeable depending on queue depths, and even the nature of the write requests (large file vs small). This is because of the advancements Seagate’s firmware team has done on the algorithms baked in. For example, their branch predication models are darn near precognitive in their ability to ‘guess’ right. The downside is they are highly tuned to guessing NAS-related scenarios and thus outside that niche can be somewhat underwhelming in their abilities when compared to the more… general-purpose predictive algorithms used in previous ‘Wolf’ generations.
Furthermore, as the firmware must take into account this radically different write timing and use its RAM buffer to help obfuscate this write delay, more of the 512MB RAM cache has to be dedicated towards write buffering and less for read predictions. Which in turn impacts overall read performance. Especially random read performance.
Make no mistake, Seagate’s firmware team was hard at work improving the read algorithms along with those write alogs’… but there is only so much one can do when dealing with a radically different RAM buffer bifurcation configuration compared to previous IronWolf Pro generations (and Exos for that matter). To be blunt, this is the first time we can actually see a need for even bigger RAM buffer, and would really like to see Seagate move to a 1GB (or bigger) buffer so as to allow these read algorithms room to fully function, make more guesses, and even further help remove the sometimes obvious write delaying quirk of the IronWolf Pro.
In the meantime, this lessening of Laser fire does indeed mean lowered read and write performance… but it also means the IronWolf Pro 30TB is less noisy, and cooler running, than the Exos M 30TB. Something extremely important in the NAS world. Especially for those rocking NAS appliances, which by their very “(build) cost-constrained” nature offer mediocre (at best) cooling abilities.
Overall, as you can see this time the IronWolf Pro is no shee… err… Exos in wolf’s clothing. Instead, it is exactly the type of reliable workhorse that will let your NAS architect (or just you, if you are a small, small business) sleep at night, even if the backup plan to the backup plan is written on a (small) napkin. Just understand that it is quirky compared to many, many generations of consistency. Which may or may not be a good thing in the short term.
