Seagate 16TB Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro NAS Hard Drives Revealed

Good news for those looking maximum storage in both small and large NAS drive enclosures, with the announcement that the Seagate Ironwolf NAS hard drive series is going to be available in a staggering 16 Terabyte capacity hard disk. It has long been established that when it comes to the largest possible drives available for your NAS, Seagate appears to beat everyone to the punch, with the recent 14 Terabyte Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro NAS drives dominating the market of late. Although enterprise in design, the release of an even bigger range of 16TB NAS hard drives is generally seen as a good sign for both home and business users alike.

Much like other Seagate Ironwolf drives, the Seagate Ironwolf 16TB series arrives with NAS optimised RV sensors, improved caching on-board and construction quality that is far superior to that of general smaller capacity hard drives in 2019. Alongside this, we fully expect the Seagate Ironwolf health management tool, that is available to Ironwolf drive users already, to be fully supported on NAS platforms such as Synology, QNAP, Asustor and Terramaster. Finally, the dedicated 7200rpm on both Standard and Pro series models is always a welcome bonus and ensures reliable speeds of Read and Write internally and externally, that is considerably higher than both domestic hard drives and lower capacity NAS hard drives.

Of course one of the main distinctions between the Ironwolf ST16000VN001 and Ironwolf ST16000NE000 Pro is the environmental stability and rigidity on supported RAID volumes. Whereby standard Ironwolf drives are recommended for upto 5/8 HDD (depending on the system) and Seagate Ironwolf Pro is recommended for larger desktop and rackmount NAS use, this recommendation is continued with the 16TB ironwolf drives.

However, if you can overlook the increased MTBF and Extended warranty and rescue services included with the pro drive, it is worth highlighting that the newer generation of 12TB, 14TB and 16TB Ironwolf standard NAS drives still provide frankly incredible speeds over 10Gbe for photo and video editors.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and overlook that Additional warranty and Seagate Rescue Recovery service. The 5-year warranty on the ST16000NE000 16TB Ironwolf Pro NAS hard drive is greater, of course, than that of the 3 years included with the standard ST16000VN001 ironwolf NAS drive. If you are someone that takes pride and care in your warranty peace of mind, then this may be reason enough to purchase a Seagate iIonwolf pro drive. However, one MAIN reason to buy a Pro series drive (whether it is the new 16TB ironwolf NAS drive or a smaller capacity) is the Seagate Rescue Data Recovery Services that are included with your purchase. Unlike almost every other hard drive brand in the world, Seagate have included with their Ironwolf Pro drives free (inclusive) data recovery services in the event of file deletion, file corruption, hard drive damage, internal issue, or a plethora of other third-party factors that can damage the contents of your drive resulting in data loss.

For anyone that has ever had to consider the services of forensic data recovery in order to retrieve top-end corporate files, client data, precious photos of friends and family or other truly irreplaceable data, you will know that data recovery services will cost you thousands of pounds without any real guarantee of data recovery success. It is more than a simple case of some freeware recovery software to scan your drive with. We are talking about genuine forensic level retrieval, with data recovery services based in numerous locations in the world. In the event that your Seagate NAS Drive requires deep and forensic level data recovery (up to and including stripping the drive down to its platters), then the Seagate rescue recovery service will more than likely be the answer to your prayers and given the price difference between Seagate Ironwolf standard 16TB and Ironwolf Pro is remarkably small at each capacity level (getting smaller at each increase of capacity in fact), from a business and even a home perspective, the inclusion of this with your 16TB drive purchase is tough to argue with.

Specifications	Ironwolf Pro	Ironwolf
Model ID	ST16000NE000	ST16000VN001
Interface	SATA 6Gb/s	SATA 6Gb/s
Drive Bays Recommended	Up to 24-bay	1-8 Bays
Terabytes Per Year Written (TB/yr)	300	180TB/year
Rotational Vibration Sensors (RV)	Yes	Yes
Cache on-board (MB)	256MB	256MB
Rotation Speed (RPM)	7200	7200
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF in Hours)	1.2M	1,000,000hr
Max Sustained Transfer Rate OD (MB/s)	250	210MB/s
Warranty (years)	5	3
Rescue Services Included	Yes	No

When Will the Seagate Ironwolf ST16000NE000 and ST16000VN001 NAS Drives be Released?

It is still too early to confirm the official release of the Seagate Ironwolf ST16000NE000 and ST16000VN001 16TB NAS Drives, as alot of focus is on the Seagate Ironwolf 110 NAS SSDs right now.  Though given the strength of partner marketing with popular NAS brands right now and those very same respective brands announcing new hardware next week for release in September/October, I think we will see full availability of these drives by the end of August (maybe even a pinch sooner in bigger quantities). Let us be frank, none of us (me here on the blog and you there reading this) is surprised that a 16TB NAS Hard Drive was going to be released, or that it would be Seagate doing it.

But I think the fact the 16TB drive arrives so soon after the 12TB Ironwolf and with WD Red still seeming too invested in 10TB (talk of a 12TB imminent though), can only mean that we will see 16TB Seagate EXOs, Skyhawk and Barracuda very soon indeed.

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