Review: Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD with Synology DS918+ NAS

With the growing demand for storage space at home, I’ve set up an NAS (Network Attached Storage) with three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS HDD (Hard Disk Drive) in a Synology DS918+ DiskStation. Just in time for World Backup Day 2021 today.

 

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The three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD freshly unwrapped (lower photo) and just prior to installation into the Synology DS918+ DiskStation NAS.

With the exponentially increasing demand for storage space, businesses and home users constantly find themselves exhausting whatever storage they have – be it to store text documents, databases, photos or huge video files.

 

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The NAS sitting pretty alongside the Linksys E9450 router, all set up with RAID5 in a Synology DS918+ DiskStation with three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDDs within.

And with the COVID-19 pandemic, employees are working from home and students are doing home-based learning – resulting in large increases in demand for storage needs at home eg. if you’re a creative pro who now have to do your video-editing at home instead of at the office.

 

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The three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDDs and Synology DS918+ DiskStation NAS just prior to unboxing.

Having gotten by with a desktop expansion HDD connected to my work laptop, I’ve decided to set up an NAS at home – to not only increase storage capacity but also to share that storage with all members of the family.

Add to that the convenience of accessing documents from any device at home – and even from outside the home via the Internet, as well as the ability to stream songs and movies to the TV, speakers and mobile devices.

 

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The freshly unboxed Synology DS918+ DiskStation and three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDDs. The Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB is a 3.5-inch HDD that’s filled with Helium to reduce drag and vortex. The drive has a fast spindle speed at 7,200rpm with 256MB of onboard cache.

So I’ve gotten three new IronWolf Pro 14TB NAS HDD and set them up with a Synology DS918+ over the weekend.

With two 14TB drives in a RAID1 mirroring setup for redundancy, I would have gotten 14TB of storage space – that’s plenty for the next year or so, but I foresee I’ll probably run that out in the next 3 years.

The Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB uses Parallel Magnetic Recording (PMR) to achieve a greater areal density (to squeeze its 14TB in that small form factor) and runs off a SATA (6Gbps) interface. Here, the HDDs are mounted in the disk brackets, ready to be slotted into the Synology DS918+ DiskStation.

The Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB uses Parallel Magnetic Recording (PMR) to achieve a greater areal density (to squeeze its 14TB in that small form factor) and runs off a SATA (6Gbps) interface. Here, the HDDs are mounted in the disk brackets, ready to be slotted into the Synology DS918+ DiskStation.

With three 14TB drives in a RAID5 setup, I have roughly 25TB of usable space (for the entire household) for hopefully the next five years, after which I’d probably get new drives and NAS to set up perhaps a 150TB NAS for the following five years.

The three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDDs have been set up in RAID5 in the Synology DS918+ DiskStation. Synology made the entire hardware and software installation really simple and quick and I got the NAS set up in less than 30 minutes.

The three Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDDs have been set up in RAID5 in the Synology DS918+ DiskStation. Synology made the entire hardware and software installation really simple and quick and I got the NAS set up in less than 30 minutes.

Seagate offers five years warranty and three years Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Service with its IronWolf Pro series of HDD so that’s an additional assurance to give me peace of mind for whatever I’m going to dump into the NAS.

The IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD is currently available on Shopee at a promotional price of S$699 (23% discount from UP. S$911) with 18% cashback for the 4.4 campaign.

The Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD is currently available on Shopee at a promotional price of S$699 (23% discount from UP: S$911) with 18% cashback for the 4.4 campaign.

The IronWolf 14TB HDD was first introduced more than two years ago – at that time, Seagate was the first in the world to launch the 14TB HDD for the SME/home NAS segment, with specifications that outperformed competitors that subsequently launched their own 14TB NAS HDDs.

Since then, Seagate has updated its line of NAS storage drives with new 16TB & 18TB capacity IronWolf Pro HDDs.

My Take:

The Seagate IronWolf 14TB NAS HDD is targeted at SMEs and homes to enable them to set up a reliable and high performance NAS, with NAS leaders such as Synology to implement a reliable storage and backup solution for a business’ valuable data and a user’s cherished memories.

The 3-year Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Service and 5-year warranty assures me that I’m not just buying a hard disk – instead I’m getting a storage/backup solution with after-sales service that I can depend upon.

There are ample technical performance tests on the Web pitting the IronWolf 14TB HDD against other makes, and my own performance tests showed the drives outperformed its paper specifications and matched those reported in those benchmark reviews.

For example, as a standalone hard drive connected to a PC through a standard SATA 6Gbps interface, the IronWolf Pro 14TB clocked 265MB/s for both sequential read/write operations (with data sizes of 8KB and above).

This surpasses the 255MB/s rating for maximum sustained transfer rate in Seagate’s specifications.

IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives are designed for NAS applications, with emphasis put on reliability and performance for always-on environments.

Recognised and compatible with top NAS vendors like Synology, these drives are built for multi-user environments.

These drives allow an annual workload rating of up to 300TB, so it’s more than enough for my home needs, and also adequate for most SMEs (Small & Medium-sized Enterprises).

The IronWolf Pro drives can also be used alone as a non-NAS expansion drive, but they have been designed with features that optimise their performance for NAS servers.

The AgileArray firmware for NAS servers offers a host of benefits including: RAID performance, dual-plane balance, rotational vibration (RV) sensors, advanced power management and error recovery control.

AgileArray Technology

Seagate’s AgileArray is a set of hardware, firmware and software features to meet the need for a complete NAS experience, focussing on performance, reliability and power management.

AgileArray includes:

  • Error Recovery Control: Prevents RAID drop off and speeds up data retries
  • RAID Optimisation Firmware: Improves system performance in RAID configuration
  • High Durability: 24×7 usage at workloads up to 300TB/year
  • AccuTrack: Vibration tolerance for multi-bay environments
  • Dual-Plane Balance: Less vibration for quiet operation
  • RV Sensors: Consistent performance in multi-bay environments
  • Streaming Support: Better video streaming performance
  • NAS Power Management: Lower overall power consumption

The IronWolf Pro sports Rotational Vibration (RV) sensors that maintain consistent performance in high bay-count (up to 24) NAS systems, sustaining always-on, 24×7 usage.

Synology DiskStation NAS

Synology is a leading maker of NAS servers and I deployed a DS918+ DiskStation with three brand new Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD.

I got the DS918+ back in 2018 but didn’t get around to purchasing new hard disks to populate it, so it had been sitting unopened in the store room since then.

The successor of the DS918+ is the DS920+ and you can get it here (10% discount) with 8GB RAM (S$904) or 4 GB RAM (S$765).

The successor of the DS918+ is the DS920+ and you can get it here (10% discount) with 8GB RAM (S$904) or 4 GB RAM (S$765) memory.

It was amazing how the DS918+ simply worked without a hitch when I finally unboxed it and set it up with the new IronWolf Pro HDDs.

Setup was really easy and smooth, with clear instructions on how to connect the DS918+, how to physically install the HDDs, how to install the DiskStation Manager OS and how to set up the RAID5.

One of the greatest barriers to greater adoption of NAS by consumers is the seeming complexity of setting up an NAS.

With easy-to-set-up NAS servers from makers such as Synology, and the increasing demand for reliable large shareable storage solutions, I can see the increasing adoption of NAS in consumer households.

A key consideration for choosing the IronWolf Pro is the Seagate IronWolf Health Management and 3-year Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Service (only for the IronWolf Pro).

The DiskStation Manager operating system which runs on a browser makes it easy to manage the Synology DS918+ DiskStation NAS. It is also integrated with Seagate’s Health management software.

The DiskStation Manager operating system which runs on a browser makes it easy to manage the Synology DS918+ DiskStation NAS. It is also integrated with Seagate’s Health Management software.

The Health Management embedded analysis and recovery software works seamlessly with key NAS partner systems like Synology, providing comprehensive status updates and drive health analysis, allowing me to be preventative, not just reactive in pre-empting potential failures as the drives age over time.

The 3-year Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Service is a Rescue plan that gives access to a global team of world-class data recovery experts with 95% customer satisfaction rating.

IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives feature a 3-year and 5-year limited warranty respectively.

For those into details, the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) rating is a massive 1.2 million hours.

Why RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks)?

High capacity HDDs don’t come cheap so it can be tempting to use two or three HDDs in a NAS without any redundancies.

However, with such high storage capacities, it also means that when a HDD fails, a large amount of data is lost.

Setting up a RAID configuration (other than RAID0) means that even if one of the HDD fails, no data will be lost so that a new HDD can be installed to replace the failed HDD and life can go on quickly without the pain of lost data and repairing failed hard disk drives.

However, in the worst case, it is still possible for a second HDD to fail before the first failed HDD is replaced, in which case, ALL of the data in the RAID5 NAS will be lost.

So just as you back up the HDD of your laptop/desktop onto the NAS, it’s still prudent to back up the NAS to another medium.

Better still create yet another copy off-site, either in your own physical storage, or on the cloud.

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7 Responses to “Review: Seagate IronWolf Pro 14TB HDD with Synology DS918+ NAS”

  1. Dickson Poon says:

    Is it difficult to set up an NAS at home on my own. I’m not particularly tech-savvy, just the regular tech user.

    • tech4tea says:

      It can be a bit intimidating if you’ve never set up an NAS before. But should be manageable. The NAS usually comes with clear instructions on how to install the HDDs and hook up the NAS, and the software setup is guided by a browser-based wizard. For Synology (and probably other makes as well), there’s also clear Help where you can search for guides etc. Eg. just search for RAID and all the instructions on how to set it up will be floated for you. Of course it’ll help if you have a friend who’s familiar with NAS to advise you in case you run into a deadend and can’t figure out how to move forward. Or you could come here as well, I’ll try my best to help. 🙂

      • Dickson Poon says:

        Thanks… that’s very reassuring. I might just give it a go. But first, need to buy the hard disks and NAS box first. Will check out the promotions for Seagate and Syrology that you listed. 🙂 🙂

  2. Brian Gibson says:

    Thanks for the review. I noticed from the screenshot for the health management that the drive comes with a 2-year rescue data recovery. But you mentioned 3 years in your article. Are they offering 2 years or 3yrs?

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