Seagate Nytro 3332 Review

Final Score: 81%

With the Nytro series, Seagate was and is not trying to create ‘all round’ / ‘jack of all trades’ / ‘every man’ model. Instead, the Nytro series is all about offering tailor-made perfection for very specific roles. This extremely narrow focus and satisfying very specific customer’s needs is key to understanding the thought process behind the Nytro 3332 design and if it is right for you. Just understand, the results of the Nytro 3332 will not translate over to any of the other Nytro models. The performance will simply vary too much from model to model.

With that caveat taken care of, this specific model is not intended for heavy write scenarios – and the lowered DWPD and write IOPS reflects that. So, if you are looking for server storage for VMWare duties or other virtualization tasks… the 3332 is not the model for you. Pick a different 3032 model, or even start thinking about the 5000 series. The same is also true for more common NAS duties where the drive will be routinely tasked with a random mix of read and writes… as the Nytro 3332 is not a master at this either. Instead, the Nytro 3332 has been tailor-made for “web” and “file” server storage duties, NAS read only caching duties and anywhere else the typical workload heavily favors read over write performance. This is where this particular model will excel and what it was built to do.

This is perfectly acceptable as Seagate is well aware of the highly specific needs of this corner of the market… as they helped create it in the first place. Namely, these specific buyers want ‘good enough’ durability, excellent read performance, and above everything else excel at both while also coming in at a price point that allows IT architects the luxury of specifying larger capacity variants without exceeding their budget, and do all that and while still meeting the necessary minimum performance levels required to get the job done. That is a rather specific, and demanding, list of requirements and takes rather OCD levels of concentration to deliver a Nytro variant that can do all that.

As such, while it is indeed true that Kioxia/Toshiba BiCS eTLC NAND – even ‘enterprise’ TLC – is simply less than optimal for enterprise orientated roles with as little over-provisioning as the Nytro 3332 has… this really does not matter. For the job this model was designed to do, the vast majority of time sensitive IO requests it will encounter will have the drive(s) reading data off the NAND and not writing on to it. Here enhanced ‘enterprise’ MLC NAND would not do much beyond increasing the asking price while decreasing maximum capacity possibilities.

The same is true of both less expensive SATA and more expensive NVMe Seagate Nytro options. SATA will bog down long, long before SAS will and be unable to push out anywhere close to the amount of data what SAS 12 can (be it measured in MBps or IOps). Put bluntly it will take a lot more SATA drives to reach parity with the Nytro 3332 and thus negate any cost savings SATA typically offers. NVMe on the other hand will be faster, especially when dealing with large amounts of small files, but both the cost per Gigabyte and cost per drive ‘bay’ of NVMe makes it reserved solely for higher performance servers. Servers where price takes a back seat to raw performance. Put simply SAS is (still) a decent middle road choice with a unique blend of performance vs. price… and is not going away anytime soon. It just will not be optimal for every buyer or every scenario.

That is actually a very good way of accurately describing the Nytro 3332 as it is choke full of value for the intended role it was designed to satisfy… it just has a very specific role and once you step outside its area of expertise it quickly becomes a less than optimal choice. So, if you are looking for a high-performance solid state drive that can satisfy a wide range of wants/needs/desires… the Nytro 3332 will not be an optimal match. If on the other hand you have a SAS based server that is in dire need of cache boosting performance, or a SAS based file server that just is not keeping up with your needs anymore, the Nytro 3332 should be on your short list.