New Seagate 20TB Ironwolf Pro and EXOS Hard Drive Revealed

Seagate 20TB Irownolf Pro and EXOS Hard Drives for NAS/Server

Itā€™s been in the pipeline for a while (originally revealed way back in Jan 2020 with hopes of arriving in Q1 2020 and developed deployed in the background since) that Seagate has had a planned 20 Terabyte 3.5ā€³ SATA and SAS hard drive for 24Ɨ7 server use ā€“ but data center users may be pleased to hear that it is looking like an end of 2021 release. Arriving in their popular Ironwolf Pro NAS server and EXOs data centre-class series, these are among the biggest commercially available drives in the market and are a real feather in the cap for Seagate ā€“ who recently announced their roadmap for reaching 20TB, 50TB and a staggering 100TB by 2030 ā€“ see video here. Both the EXOs and Ironwolf Pro 20TB hard drives are arriving with helium seal design, high workload rating, CMR architecture and maximum drive speeds reported at 285MB/s. For those concerned with early adoption, 20TB Hard drives have already been in usage with the likes of major cloud companies and providers (for example Facebook, Google, Amazon Web Services, Azure etc) for well over a year now, so this tier of storage is by no means in its early days of development. These are going to be some serious kit (with the EXOS series arriving in SATA/SAS and onboard encrypted hardware versions) that are going to be available to the average company. Letā€™s take a closer look at each of these drives, how Seagate hit the big 2-0 and whether these should be your next big business storage purchase to hit the Petabyte mark?

What Are the Hardware Specifications of the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 20TB NAS Hard Drive?

The Seagate Ironwolf drive media range still continues to be one of the biggest in the NAS market, arriving at a better price point than most, yet still providing top-level performance and endurance. Alongside the inclusive business-level data recovery services included with the Ironwolf HDDs (so 5 years standard warranty and 3 years of inclusive data recovery coverage in the event of failure), this drive is also heavily geared towards the 24Ɨ7 use of NAS systems in both home and business. This new 20TB NAS hard drive is part of the Seagate Ironwolf Pro series, so that means an impressive 300TB workload rating, 5-year warranty, 7200RPM, 256MB cache and perfect for much, MUCH larger rackmount arrays. Although not likely to be the quietest drive, this will likely be largely dwarfed by the active cooling systems of even the most conservative business NAS solution. Below is a breakdown of those specifications in full:

Seagate Ironwolf Pro 20TB NAS Hard Drive

Product Family SEAGATE IRONWOLF Pro
Capacity 20TB
Standard Model Number ST20000NE000
Interface SATA ONLY
Drive Bays Supported Upto 24-Bays
Recording Technology CMR
Drive Design (Air or Helium) Helium
Workload Rate Limit (WRL) 300TB
Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200
Cache (MB) 256
Max. Transfer OD (MB/s) 285MB/s
Annual Power-On Hours 8760
Sector Size (Bytes per Logical Sector) 512E
Startup Current, Typical (12V, A) 2..0
Idle Power, Average (W) 5.5
Average Operating Power (W) 7.7W
Standby Mode, Typical (W) 1
Sleep Mode, Typical (W) 1
Vibration, Nonoperating: 10Hz to 500Hz (Grms) 2.27
Acoustics, Idle (typical, measured in Idle 1 state) (dBA) 28
Acoustics, Seek (typical) (dBA) 32
Rescue Data Recovery Services 3yr
Warranty 5yr

Unfortunately, this drive will not be seeing a non-PRO release, given the restructuring of Seagate in their capacities across PRO/non-PRO ranges. Additionally, the Seagate Ironwolf Pro will likely be quite a pricey drive, both for those enterprise build specs, the capacity and simply the exclusivity of the drive on the market.

What Are the Hardware Specifications of the Seagate Ironwolf Pro 20TB NAS Hard Drive?

The Seagate EXOS series, although often compared and similar to that of Seagate Ironwolf due to itā€™s server design and deployment, is a drive with a much larger focus of heavy, HEAVY workloads. The Seagate 20TB EXOs hard drive, much like the previous capacities before it, arrives with a hefty 550TB workload limit (TBC!), choice of SATA or SAS interfaces, 7200 PRM and a massive 2.5 million hours MTBF. As you would expect from an enterprise-grade drive, there is also a choice of self-encrypted drive (SED) versions that also features FIPS support (government class encryption). Below is a breakdown of the SATA/SAS EXOs 20TB hard drives and how they compare:

SPECIFICATIONS SATA DRIVE ā€“ 20TB X20 Series

SAS DRIVE ā€“ 20TB X20 Series

Product Family EXOS X20 EXOS X20
Capacity 20TB 20TB
Standard Model Number ST20000NM007D ST20000NM002D
SED Model ST20000NM000D ST20000NM003D
SED FIPS Model N/A ST20000NM005D
Helium Sealed-Drive YES YES
CMR YES YES
RPM 7200 7200
Cache (MB) 256MB 256MB
Sustained Read (OD) 285MB/s 285MB/s
Sustained Write (OD) 272MB/s 272MB/s
Random Read 4K QD16 165 IOPS 165 IOPS
Random Write 4K QD16 550 IOPS 550 IOPS
Average Latency (ms) 4.16 4.16
Idle A (W) Average 5.4W 5.8W
Vibration, Nonoperating: 2 to 500Hz (Grms) 2.27 2.27
Shock, Operating 2ms (Read/Write) (Gs) 40 40
MTBF 2.5Million 2.5Million
Power-On Hours per Year 8760 8760
Warranty 5yr 5yr

Although lacking the Rescue data recovery services of the Ironwolf Pro HDDs, the Seagate EXOS 20TB has an incredibly sharp focus on robust deployment and touch-of-a-button responsiveness (i.e low latency) which is vital in considerably larger data center/hyperscale environments.

When will the Seagate EXOS and Ironwolf Pro 20TB HDDs Be Released?

Seagate has been particularly firm on their stance about introducing 20TB hard drives into their portfolio before the close of 2021 (despite HDD market-changing factors, SUCH as Chia, Hardware shortages and the pandemic) and all indications so far would heavily indicate the availability of the new Seagate Ironwolf Pro and EXOS 20TB hard drives landing (not just announcing, but being business-available) on time. Despite SSD prices and NVMe SSD technology growing in its appeal and affordability these last few years, Seagate still seems fantastically committed to hard drive technology as still the best option for BIG data this decade and these new 20TB drives are going to be a big step for any business looking at the realistic need to store petabytes of data. Pricing for each version of the 20TB Seagate HDD series is almost certain to be a sore point for some, but Seagate almost certainly knows that people will pay it.

 

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      281 thoughts on “New Seagate 20TB Ironwolf Pro and EXOS Hard Drive Revealed

      1. I dropped WD for Seagate when it came to upgrading my NAS during this fiasco as I really couldn’t be bothered to fight my way through WD’s HDD specs; it waws far easier to use Seagate as they weren’t obfuscating their HDD specs.
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      2. WARNING: This wasn’t mentioned in the video, but you NEED to be aware of the Seagate Warranty. It runs from the data of manufacture, NOT the date of purchase. This means if a company has had the drive in its inventory for a long time, you may get a WAY less Warranty period than you expect. People who sell Seagate drives are supposed to be authorised resellers, but this isn’t always the case and I bought through Amazon too. Seagate will usually honour the sale date, if you can provide proof, but it’s still a bit of a faff with at least a week+ of downtime whilst you RMA a failed drive. So, beware of this before you buy and check your warranties are what you expect, or you could find yourself in a protracted support discussion with Seagate as I have done on a few occasions.
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      3. I know a lot about Seagate drives as I have, errrm, almost 100 of them… So I really hope you mention stuff line MTBF and especially the warranty because the warranty on a Seagate drive is probably NOT what you think it is.

        And you may also want to quickly discuss the SMR fiasco and the drives affected.

        And I have to disagree with you about Toshiba drives. I’ve usually found them to be way cheaper than Seagate and have reasonable performance, the only drawback being that they’re usually loud. And I do mean nerve-rackingly loud. Their normal operation almost sounds like a failing drive. I had 12 of them in one of my NAS devices and the clicking during reading as the head stepped was simply nuts. You’ve got no chance of differentiating between a falling and working drive because they basically sound the same!
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      4. I have been working with and building PC since 80 or so. I have had more seagate drives fail than any other brand. I quit buying seagate drives around 2000. But wound up with one in an external drive and it too failed.. WD all the way for me.
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      5. I know this video is older, but Iā€™m running a high end gaming PC. Should I get the barracuda pro 8TB 7200 RPM or the iron wolf 8TB 7200 RPM. I have two firecuda SSDā€™s Iā€™m gonna use for more higher end demanding games. But for more basic games Iā€™m throwing them on the HDD and donā€™t know which series to go with. Spec wise they all show the same numbers. Iā€™ve always been told barracuda is for gaming, but now my research is also saying ironwolf is good for gaming too.
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      6. The newest generation of Exos Mach.2 SATA drives are near silent inside the Expansion line of external HDDs, the components they use to dampen the vibration is amazing. Even after I shuck them and put them inside a 4 bay NAS, they’re still very very quiet compare to any other enterprise HDDs.
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      7. I had 14 seagate 2TB drives on my LSI RAID6 around 13 years ago and 12 of them died right after 1.5 years of usage. and recently I had 10 seagate ironwolfs(not the pro version) on hardware raid6 again, 6 of them die and I had to move all my data around to HGST , Toshiba and WD disks and remove ALL the seagate drives out of my server! I will never buy Seagate hard disks again! I have some WD green drives in my box that last longer than all my Seagate drives really! To save your time and money, do not consider buying Seagates!
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      8. i have used seagate before, and i will never use sagate again because it keeps failing. i sent the drive for replacement, after replaced the drive failed again. i can not tolerate the high failure rate two times a row? wtf seagate. luckily, the drive just stores movies that i don’t really care about.
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      9. Hi NASCompare friends. Is there a ‘tape a pinout’ method to make a Seagate work as an internal drive (for Seagate drives that only work as an internal drive)?
        Western Digital has that 3rd pin on the contacts of the power to enable some WD drives.

        God bless, Rev. 21:4
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      10. All that talk and yet you say nothing worth hearing. I was already 10 minutes in waiting for you to give your OPINION on why we should or should not buy a Seagate hard drive and just realized, THIS IS CLICK BAIT! YOU’RE NOT SAYING ANYTHING WORTH LISTENING TO! That’s when I clicked off and WISHED THAT YOUTUBE HAD A BLOCK USER FEATURE!
        REPLY ON YOUTUBE

      11. MAXTOR, actually
        Hitachi was better than all of them

        Pretty sure harddrives are just binning and firmware. The different labels come from the same factory, dependent on the maximum capacity in the range and to some extent specification. (22TB generation exos, ironwolf, barracuda pro, all come from 22TB factory, all helium filled, all 7200rpm, all the same mechanism. just different bin and firmware)
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      12. Indeed great video, thanks! Now, since some years have gone by, would you still recommend the EXOs over the Pro? (I just bought my first NAS (Synology D220+), and intend to use it mainly for watching my video files and all other storage. It came with one slot filled with a 4 TB Seagate Ironwolf, and I’m looking to add a 16 TB one for the second slot, totalling 20 TB (which should last me years).)
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      13. ŠšŠ°Ń€Š¾Ń‡Šµ Š±ŠµŃŃˆŃƒŠ¼Š½Ń‹Šµ Š°Š¹Ń€Š¾Š½Š²ŃƒŠ»ŃŒŃ„ ŠµŃŠ»Šø ŠµŃŃ‚ŃŒ Š“ŠµŠ½ŃŒŠ³Šø, ŠµŃŠ»Šø Š“ŠµŠ½ŠµŠ³ Š½ŠµŃ‚ тŠ¾ шуŠ¼Š½Ń‹Šµ ŠµŠŗŠ·Š¾Ń
        REPLY ON YOUTUBE

      14. In the EXOS series
        Seagate Exos 2X18 (ST18000NM0092)

        Seagate Exos X18 (ST18000NM003J)

        Both are 18TB SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 3.5″ Enterprise HDDs.

        However, one has better random access performance! Another factor to consider!
        REPLY ON YOUTUBE

      15. I use WD NVMe, SSD, and Hard Drives in my computers. I use Seagate Exos in my home 4-bay NAS, and Seagate IronWolf in my 2-bay off-site cloud VPN NAS. The IronWolf are a lot quieter, but the Exos were cheaper per TB. I am a bit paranoid with my data, I maintain a 7-2-2 backup setup.
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      16. I prefer using Exos in my pc. Not just because I have 3 hard disks but Exos is designed for heavy usage and more importantly because of the multi bay environment, it can deal with more vibrations than the normal single bay hard disk for PC. Kinda sad when 2 of my 3TB Barracuda went kaput on me so I bought the Exos and had been running fine for quite some time..
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      17. Great video but i do have questions, i use a big drive in my pc and i back it up on a external disk. I want a disk that’s reliable for years to come but i always find that those drives are the enterprise/nas drives. But they say those drives are not great for desktop applications due to error corrections since a server normaly does that in a larger array?
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      18. I know this video is 2 years old by now, but I hope you can answer a question…
        I want a large HDD that’s at least 16 TB.
        But I don’t want layering, or helium, or other gimmicks.
        What are my options?
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      19. Seagate warranty is a pile of SH*T…brand new 20tb Ironwolf pro (I have 30 of them) will not spin up and they want me to send in the motherboard specs to the server and two pc’s I hooked it to. They want screenshots of it hooked as a standalone drive and screenshots as as secondary drive. They want a video of the drive hooked to a pc so they can remotely diagnose why it will not spin. Needless to say they did not replace it.
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      20. Out of all the brands of HDDā€™s Iā€™ve owned over the years I only ever had two fail. One internal and one external and they were both Seagate. Iā€™m thinking of setting up a small Raid NAS for me and my family to use and looking at Seagate again because of the price and benchmarks, but can anyone chime in on their personal experience with Ironwolf and/or Exos drives?
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      21. Love the video. I have a little home server and I really like the Seagate Exos drives. Do they have to be used in arrays? I never really turn the home server off so its not being cycled all the time, but I don’t have enough for a RAID array. Just random hard drives I’ve picked up.
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      22. I wouldn’t trust anything on a seagate drive. Seagate is about 80% of our business at the data recovery lab I work at. Usually for some kind of firmware issue. G-List corruption is pretty common as well
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      23. I have over 1.1PB gross capacity, 800TB after RAID installed in NAS systems I have built up over the years. My oldest is a HA Synology from 7 years ago with 24 x 10TB HGST SAS drives. One drive has failed in the last 7 years. In other NAS I have added over the years I have used EXOS drives. None have failed. My latest addition is 12 x 20TB Ironwolf Pro. in a rackmount Qnap. The Pro drives were cheapest this time. In each case my priorities were 1) suitability for purpose then 2) price per TB. Since they live in their own separately cooled room with much louder servers, noise isn’t a problem. I use these for large scale development, simulation and research archives.
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      24. I’m using Seagate drives on all of my NAS units. Previously my go-to was the Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro, but both of these had quality issues as I’ve had to replace almost every drive in two 8-bay units during the first 1,5 years. The first replacement drives failed as well, some even before the RAID was rebuilt. All that when Seagate was not honoring warranty and refunded me the cost of a drive when I had a degraded RAID arrays, sometimes two, desperately in need of new drives. My latest NAS has 8x Exos 18TB and it has been working so much better, no SMART status errors, no broken drives and they are fast. The only thing that bugs me is that they are slightly louder than the Ironwolf drives (sounds like boiling eggs). I might have bought Ironwolf for the latest NAS as well, but nobody had any drives. Even the Exos drives were hard to get, I waited almost two months for some. Now I’ve bought replacement drives that are waiting for a failure just because I can’t rely on the warranty and degraded RAID arrays can’t wait 2-3 months for a new drive.
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      25. Thank you for sharing, which HDDs would you recommend to go for in a NAS if mostly used as a photography storage accessed occasionally? I understand NAS is not a back up solution, but I would like to use it as raid 6 and actually have it as a main storage.
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      26. You don`t care anyway since you are just another Amazombi. You get 3% no matter what we buy from your links. If Azon is so cheap how come Bezos is a billionaire? Idinit? Keep on pushin’, Wankenstein.
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      27. Great video! How about a drive for long term back up and duplicated that gets written to maybe once a month? I current have WD gold 8TB with a partition for NTFS and one for AFS?
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      28. I have one argument against EXOS – if we need something cheaper for home NAS and we don’t need 16TB, but just 2-4TB, Ironwolf is better, because the smallest EXOS is 16TB, which is significantly more expensive than 4TB Ironwolf.
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      29. Wanting a 20TB drive for storing recorded videos and uploading from said HDD to YouTube post-recording. I assume Exos Enterprise is not the way to go? As upload speeds are currently 52mb/s and will be upto 100mb/s in the future. I think anything that’s 200mb/s or more would be ample for a storage drive as I will still be recording to my Samsung SSD of upto 480mb/s while moving to a 8TB NVME SSD for recording to when I get a RTX5090. The current HDD in my PC is a 1TB HD103UJ which is around 100mb/s and so I will be splitting a partition of around 2-4TB for older games.

        Basically when you record 4K Good Quality CQ16 Hogwarts Legacy with Reshade to sharpen details you’re looking at around 3gb a minute, leading a 1 hour video to be close to 200gb. This would mean that 5 hours of recorded footage at 4K per day would be around 1TB. So I need the storage, this way I can let videos upload constantly instead of waiting for them to upload before deleting them to record more. If you could recommend something that would be great. I of course don’t need 20TB but just want to make sure I at least get 16GB so I can at least get a few days of recording if I was recording 10 hours or more per day (2TB+)
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      30. Barracuda might not be designed for RAID, but my NAS is just a PC case and I can spread them apart. I run RAID 1, so it will probably just work. Even performance isn’t much of a concern for archive and photos. What I really need is lots of storage and a nice quiet 5400RPM drive. The 8TB Barracuda 5400 might be that. Edit: not sure about SMR. The search continues…
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      31. all these large drives tick thump at idle that drives us nuts or they have a pre wear leveling arm spastic arm every 5 seconds
        my quest ist now to find the largest drive that wont tick in my pc desktop case and avoid a tickidy tock large server hdd
        my top hgst 4tb ale640 makes no noise at idle and my papersticker seagate 8tb ticks and the 12tb also ticks at idle
        the silver hgst 6 and hgst to WD 8tb still silver front are my next silent try outs to get, i have a feeling that they will die faster
        then the 3 and 4 tb silent idle hgst ale640’s do
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      32. Comprehensive and useful. If using the drive as Archive-only, rather than NAS application, is there any drawback to choosing the EXOS drives in 14+ TB sizes? Even a year later than your comments here, they remain the lowest price per TB.
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      33. Well I like to exos drive simply because it’s just faster on all accounts and once the drives that hit above 500 GB traditional I just too freaking slow. Just doing a scan takes all the two days only 500 GB on a traditional one head drive. I do realize with the exos that with the additional head was going to be extra power usage. Although with the additional heads and lower RPMs they might moderate it
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      34. I would love to see a new comparison video between Exos and Ironwolf Pro Drives, because the new Ironwolf Pro generation (e.x ST8000(NT)001 / 500TB per Year Workload, 2M MTBF and unlimited drive bays supported) rivals the Exos Drives in my opinion.
        I would like to hear your thoughts about it.
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      35. Excellent information in this video! Thanks!

        I have been using Seagate drives for many years. I’ve also used other manufacture drives. I’ve had very few issues with drives. I found when installed with fans blowing air over the drive surfaces for cooling they lasted longer. Since SSDs became reasonable in cost I have been using them for boot drives. I use hybrid drives for data storage. With small business and home computers I have had these drives last for some years with very little failure. It is important to buy a drive designed for the type of use if you want decent performance and reliability. In commercial environments where the drives are heavily used failures were happening more often.
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      36. My opinion on HDD OEMs

        WesternDigital: you canā€™t buy anything from es because wd is straight up lying or changing the specs and components of their drives without disclosing it. You get what wd has in the garbage bin at that point in time. And expensive.

        Seegate: cheap buy least reliable of the 3 oems

        Toshiba: somewhere in between the other two without the lying of WD. My actual go to brand.
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      37. The most important thing to know is that you CANNOT play X/S games from the HDD. You can store the X/S games but you must move the game to internal storage or a Seagate SSD card to play it. The OG games, 360, and ONE games will play just fine from the HDD which is USB 3.2 ????
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      38. bloody jesus dude, i just watched this whole video and i just came to the realization that i’m fugging stupid !!! ????????
        Dell PC desk top = music, videos and pictures… what do I need, something BIG I hope 14tb 16tb ???
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      39. I run Seagate Barracuda 2.5″ drives in my NAS, but I 100% expect them to fail. Running double parity, and I keep a few drives sitting around waiting for it. But they’re cheap and they work, even with shingled storage, it’s fine for my needs.
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      40. What does it matter to the drive how many “bays” there are in total? Maybe I’m misunderstanding, but you mean other simultaneously connected drives to a computer. Now Barracudas DM are SMR, and VX are still CMR. Until this happened, how could a drive be “geared” towards a certain performance? It’s not that a VX is unable to read. I use them in my computers.
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      41. my seagate compute 8TB is annoying the hell outta me, its just a few months old, when i bought the drive i just Quick formatted 2 times as i read thats what you do with a new drive, i installed games from steam, it starts been funny, i power on my PC the Bios/intro screen automatically starts scanning and repairing this drive, everytime i reboot my pc it does this, drive does show in windows and appears to be working its accessable however thoughtout the day the desktop will give me a popup about this drive needing a repair also steam is refuseing to update games due to a currupt disk? its not dead its just been awkward, also having issues in games with loading. any ideas?
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      42. What about storage purposes? Everyone talking about SkyHawk as surveillance but doesn’t it also mean it’s best for storage purposes? However, we have to use storage disks time to time make a read from for video, music or pictures etc. Also when it comes to price, Barracuda (ST4000DM004)[price_1889] is 50% more expensive than Skyhawk (ST4000VX007)[price_1271] at the moment. Exos (ST4000NM005A)[price_2084] is also close to Barracuda’s price range, only 9-10% more expensive.
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      43. I bought an 8TB Seagate and it must have been a mistake as it only have 150 Gb capacity on it. I verified the correct format and drive type and still 150 GB for what should be 8 TB. Returning it to Target.
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      44. Hello to you Sir and anyone else.
        I just need a HHD to free up my SSDs and reorganize.
        Which one should I get for use with my MacBook?
        I am interested in the ranges from 10-16TB.

        Thank you for your responses before I see and reply.
        REPLY ON YOUTUBE

      45. i dont know if it’s just bad luck but the ONLY hdd to fail on me twice were Seagate. Rest of the HD i use are currently WD. The recent one died a couple days ago literally a few months after the warranty ran out. Is seagate even worth buying still?
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      46. very helpful… i’m still going to go with the exos 12tb for my desktop…. i run all my fans at a min of 50% anyway so i don’t see any extra noise being an issue. will be nice to finally have the data space and the physical space in my case using this to replace 3 x 2tb drives.
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      47. I only buy Seagate drives nowadays because:
        – Good website and RMA procedures, easy to find data sheets and check warranty
        – Good Linux support, Seagate provides even their graphical tools for Linux

        I mean those are basic things that maybe one takes for granted, but surprisingly some of Seagates competition have so bad websites it is hard to even figure out the full product range of drives they offer. And I don’t consider a manufacturer actually supports Linux or Mac, if they expect you to install Windows to do something like upgrading firmware.
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      48. I was curios about the book on your shelf (‘Time sill tell’) and went to Amazon to find it out what is it about…
        What was the reason you found it important to include it in the video?
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      49. So if I am searching to build a NAS system primarily for my massive music & music video collection (of over 18+ tb) would it be best to get 5 of the exos 18 tb hard drives to put into my Synology DS1520+ NAS Diskstation?
        And then purchase the add on station as needed?
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      50. Don’t forget, the EXOS is a helium drive too, most Ironwolf Pros floating out there for sale are air drives. You should’ve included Firecuda drives for sure or, at least, dedicate a video to them so you can explain the caching.
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      51. Best value for capacity are still the 8tb and 10tb drives.

        But the more you put on these, the more you have to lose and Ifrom long experience I can never trust any Seagate drive.
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      52. Having worked on servers before there was such a thing as Enterprise hardware I will always use Enterprise level hard drives, the possibility of lost data is just not worth the cost savings. Nothing is guaranteed but remember it’s not if the hard drive will fail but when.
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      53. Iā€™m a little annoyed the firecuda wasnā€™t talked about at all. I was also hoping for a little more on the exo series. Iā€™m looking for a large volume hard drive for multiple uses. Movies, gaming, development.m, etc. I want to get the best performance for my dollar. From what I can tell the Exo is the most powerful and best bang for your buck. Right now 8tb Firecuda is $203 and a 16gb x16 is $223. I get double the space for $20 bucks and possibly even better performance so why would anyone go for the firecuda other than the power consumption?
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      54. Even though I will only run a 4-Bay nas with 4 drives, I’ll still get Exos drives. Yes they’re louder but the 14TB Versions I’m considering are substeantially cheaper. The NAS will really only be an archival system to store my RAW Video files.
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      55. hey there , thanks for ur great video. im in need of a 10 tb around hdd that i could keep videos and movies in it i offten also watch those movies , which hdd u suggest
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      56. Wish I saw this before taking the plunge but I bought two 12TB EXO’s, the price at the time was the cheapest at that size and came with the nice 5 year warranty !
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      57. I have a Seaget 4TB HD that always gives me a reading error after a few months, the only way to solve it is formatting. how can we trust 4TB in a brand that makes a person lose everything? imagine 20TB absurd. who else has lost their HD files from this brand?
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      58. I’m looking to build a new Plex server. Which drive is more ideal, the Ironwolf or Exos? Also should I run something like a HBA card on TrueNAS or a RAID card on Windows?
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      59. Al Barracuda drives 2TB or over are SMR, only the 1TB is CMR in the Barracuda family. That’s why I went Barracuda Pro for my HDD 4 years back, all of the Pro versions are CMR.
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      60. If i have an a 2 bay raid enclosure , I want to use it just for raid 1 to back up my video files once/twice a week do i still need the iron wolf or i can just buy the barracuda ?
        Great content , learned a lot from you, thanks.
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      61. LOL, sir, you underestimate how old some of us are. There used to be a lot more popular hard-drive brands other than just WD, Seagate, and Toshiba. I don’t know what brand of hard drive was in my family’s first PC, a Mac Plus, but I know that the first hard drive I had in a windows PC was Fujitsu (which ran great for many years until I eventually retired it because it was too small), and my second hard drive was a Quantum/ Maxtor drive. I have owned one Seagate and many, many WD drives since then though.
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      62. never buy seagate SMR drives. They end up corrupting their firmwares during heavy writes and are very problematic when you do batch writes. They are typically put in backup/archive drives but are a poor choice for your backups. Speaking from experience.
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      63. Great video, thanks!
        Interestingly, while (looking at product manuals for 10TB drives) the older Ironwolf Pro models (such as ST10000NE0008) should be about 1dB quieter than EXOS drives, the latest ST10000NE000 Ironwolf Pro model now has the same acoustic specs as its EXOS counterpart (ST10000NM001G). Noise may be going away as a differentiating factor.
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      64. It’s march 21, 2021 and, O”Boy I love your video, that and the fact I bought a Seagate EXOS. three days ago, for all the reasons you mentioned. There is a tipping point that comes with buying anything, in this case I have an abundance of hard drives along with plenty of SATA ports eight to be exact on each of two Motherboards and extra SATA controller cards. Yet todays Computer cases lack 3.5″ storage space. Most only allow for 2 or 3 mechanical drives and some up to 8 SSD’s and Nvme.M.2’s but the newer cases if selected right will also come equipped with incredible dust filters. Cleaning dust from computers three times a year by taking them apart can be dangerous. Mine are or were RAID/ JOBD. (I did back-up first) and I needed to change out a power supply that didn’t help. In the end deciding to use one large EXOS made it easier. P.S I clicked “Liked”, “Subscribed”, and clicked the “Bell” for all your videos.
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      65. I’ve been a loyal Seagate customer for decades; I’ve tried other brands over the years, including WD drives, and some others, and always come back to Seagate. When purchasing for the company, always have been choosing Seagate when possible. They’ve just been the more reliable brand overall..

        For home use, I tend to boot and run from SSD, but for raw storage, I tend to prefer the slower spindle speeds and larger cache. In a NAS at home, I still would lean towards a slower drive for less noise, less heat, and hopefully longer life. The data recovery feature, while it sounds like a nice feature, well, I’m going to say my drives tend to last longer than the warranty anyways, so while it’s insurance, it’s insurance that will often NEVER get collected upon.

        Playing the odds: Only a fool keeps his/her important data on one drive, and waits for it to fail. If you know the manufacturer’s warranty, for all intents and purposes, assume 80% of that, and be prepared for failure at that point. Check your drives and backups on a routine basis; a NAS is not a backup device, although it can be. Keep at least 3 copies of your important data, on 3 different systems, separate systems. Ideally, two or more of your copies will be on OFFLINE (powered down ) backups. I’d lean towards SSD drives for the really important stuff- keeping them as offline media.
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      66. 20TB drives aren’t worth it right now as they are waaaaaay more expensive then the 18TB right now 18TB exos drives or 18TB toshiba enterprise drives are the best for cost/GB
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      67. WD also had a scandal of submarining their SSD after reviewers had done all articles and videos about the SSD. WD is one huge shitty company. Anyway in my experience Seagate drives have been far more reliable than WD.
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      68. Seems like the Ironwolf drives are gimmicky. You say it is suggested between a certain amount of drives, but the EXOS just seem like a better deal throughout all of the info and they are even cheaper. I feel anything labeled NAS drive is always marked up for no good reason.
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      69. I remember Seagate drives having higher failure rates than both Toshiba and WD. And WD would have the lowest typical failure rates. Seagate really needed that data recovery service included for people to even try their products again. That was only a few years ago.

        Now Seagate has the lowest failure rates while WD has the highest. Seems like current WD management is running WD into the ground. By sacrificing quality for higher profit margins. And I guess the included data recovery service gave Seagate an excellent insight of common failures on their products. Data which they obviously used to their advantage. It’s actually quite brilliant.
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      70. i have a pair of 8TB Ironwolf PRO drives which are warm ad loud (not helium technology) I don’t know weather I would be able to sell them off, I also have a Qnap enclosure for them that I use maybe once a month…
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      71. Where I live Toshiba are cheaper pr TB today. MG09 18 TB is the sweet spot. Would not touch any Seagate drive with 40 foot pole anyway. Really unreliable in my experience.
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      72. when I was the university I used to be in disk recovery and I always recommend Seagate. Then went to work for a corporate job where only had HP SANs and disks. after decades of working for them A left return to a world where everything has changed recently I had to build a SAN base on open source software and choose disks completely on the fact, I use to use Seagate disk as a student. I made a lucky guess
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      73. Hello,
        As this is a mechanical drive, I have an important question ….
        How many physical spinning disks are there in the 20TB model ?
        I can’t find this information anywhere : ((
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      74. Hey! Just subbed.
        I have 21 tb worth of data… On my 6 Seagate 4.5 tb drives. Can I use EXOS to just store data on it? Not in nas. Just archival purpose. Just copy and store data and then only read from it now and then. Replace it after 10 years.
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      75. One thing I can for sure verify alot of newer drives after Seagate gain more memory cause they can shingle magnetic recording overlapping tracks there’s pros and cons EXOs are pure PMR drives verified up to 16tb
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      76. I can confirm that both 18 TB and 20 TB pro drives have exactly same dimensions and thickness.
        According to qnap official website the 18 TB drive, currently is compatible with QNAP TS-453D but it is not supported by Seagate IronWolf Health Management in the current QTS version.
        Qnap website says that support will be added for this drive in the future releases (4.5.2).
        Any good reason not to get the latest 20 TB version for my QNAP TS-453 NAS?

        Qnap email service support would be useless at this time, I know for sure, they didn’t test the 20 TB drives for my NAS, but they will do it in the future… I’m not quite sure why drive tests takes so much time, particularly for the top hard drive manufacturers.
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      77. I’m wondering if the ironwolf pro 20 TB drive version is compatible with my QNAP TS-453D NAS.
        I’m looking to upgrade my drives and 20 TB drives full popluated would be a plenty of data space.
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      78. Thanks so much for explaining my question on the difference from the wolf and exos. The sale for the 14 tb verses the wolf makes it hundreds of dollars cheaper than the wolf at the moment
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      79. I was planning to get a DS 920+ and put 18TB Exos HDDs in, now I saw that they are not on the compatibility list of Synology. Do you have any expierience with those drives in Synology NASes?
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      80. How valuable is “free data recovery” for a drive that lives in a fault tolerant array?
        If fewer drives fail than your fault tolerance can handle, there’s nothing to recover. Just replace the drive and rebuild.
        If more drives failed than your fault tolerance can handle, the data recovery people will need all of the drives in the array and a copy of the device they were running in for a “maybe”.

        If I have data that is important enough to protect with a fault tolerant array of disks, I back it up.

        On another note, if an enterprise is going to be banging away at a NAS, wants better speed and is concerned about life expectancy, they’re probably in the SAS drive range. A 15k rpm SAS compared to a 7.2k SATA with the 15k drive being rated for 50% more hours….

        That being said, the expansion of storage has been amazing. I remember managing a 1.5TB SAN with a Brocade switch that around 5k employees shared at a cost of over $500k in the early 2000’s The “cold storage” was retrieved by a robotic tape drive array and optical storage. Now a $100 drive can hold that. Storage engineers used to earn $150k to come up with ways to share 1.5TB of data.
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      81. Thanks very much for the video! 12TB Iron Wolf (non-pro) are currently priced the same as Exos 12TB where I live. Which of the two would you choose for an 8 bay Synology NAS sitting in the living room? I’m currently using 8TB IronWolf and the noise level with those is not an issue. Thanks again!
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      82. I’ve owned 4 Seagate drives over the years:: All failed prematurely. Other WD drives I’ve owned got retired before they failed, even though they’re retired, they still work. Seagate lost my patronage years ago.
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      83. Seagate hard drives are the only drives that have failed in the last 15 years. I still have Hitachi, and WD drives. I simply don’t trust seagate HDD to not fail at the worst moment. And they faile frequestly.
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      84. I was asking myself, “Why shouldn’t I buy Barracuda drives for my NAS?” You didn’t say it absolutely won’t work, but point taken. (My old LaCie external drive came with 2 3TB barracuda drives, so they aren’t listening to you.)
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      85. I was looking at the Seagate vs WD share price ($43 diff between them $56 vs $99 Seagate). It’s clear Seagate are leading the way for mass capacity storage for good reason. OEM Cloud guys trust them & need them as tech/data needs advance. WD are behind and in the years to come they’ll be a clear separation. Bitter sweet with past failures but I’ve had more failures on WD / Tosh but each to their own. Reality check is, Seagate are clearly the biggest data storage supplier Worldwide. Bravo on 20TB, HAMR, MACH 2. Mind blowing stuff. If you do chuck in the river you can send it back with their data recovery service for free Haha. @Robbie does it cover Seagulls pooping on them?!
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      86. NAS I was thinking of buying a sabrent ps5 heatsink but I still just don’t know what ssd I should buy alongside it? What ssd are you using mostly and obviously which one would fit that sabrent cover
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      87. I have been watching a lot of your videos and appreciated all the information you provide. I ordered the QNAP 253d nas and have been going back and forth between the Seagate Ironwolf 4tb and 6tb. I know you get 7200rpm on the 6tb as well as 256 cache as opposed to 5900rpm and 64 cache on the 4tb. Is the 6tb much louder than the 4tb? Is 64 cache to small? Thank you in advance
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      88. As the capacity increases, the granularity of redundancy is reduced, so with more data at risk, RAID6 becomes imperative. At what point is it better to run multiple NAS units? For most of us, $/TB is the key factor.
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      89. Sorry for being critical but i just wasted 10 mins of my life on some rudimentary specs that one can get on Seagate’s website. I was looking for more tech stuff. Neither did u do your own tests. But how could you ? Your HDDs are still in their sealed packs šŸ™‚
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      90. I have a hitstchi in my laptop it failed after a month brand new, I don’t trust it, got a 970 evo plus for OS but have a 2tb hdd and just bought a 4tb barracuda for my PS4…my 2 to us used not quite daily but at least
        3-4-times a week, I don’t use my laptop as much as I used to because it’s a ryzen 3-2200u????…but this drive is from when I was in 7th grade so I’ve had it for 7-8 years at the time of this without any issues so far, not sure how much longer it’ll last but I trust that more than my toshiba that came with it and failed right away
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      91. 20:12 6 Gbps is far more than any mechanical drive can even come close to even hoping to saturate. Even basic SATA SSDs that have about 500-600 MB/s read/write (ish) only just finally make use of the 6 Gbps SATA bus speeds. There’s probably benefits beyond the simple extra 6 Gbps of bandwidth though.
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      92. the cutlery example is probably not the best example, as it’s not that dramatic. You can put any hard drive in any system and it’ll work…you’ll run into problems potentially and in some cases more likely or sooner than later, but they will work more or less. In contrast, trying to eat steak with a spoon…not so much. šŸ™‚
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      93. Problem with 18/20TB drives is they aren’t supported by Synology, which is incomprehensibly stupid. I might just buy 8x 20TB drives next year and simply connect them to a 8x SATA ports on a motherboard… And do manual backups… Screw paying 1000+$ for an 8-bay Synology that only supports 16TB drives…
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      94. Loved the video. My main reason for choosing EXOS over Ironwolf or Ironwolf Pro is the longer service life on the EXOS drives, 2.5mln vs the Ironwolf 1.2mln. All that on a frive that is typically 10%-15% cheaper. I have a total of 36 drives across 2 x Synology NAS systems and the EXOS outperforms the Ironwolf, Pro & WD Golds.
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      95. Currently: NAS 4-bay RAID 5, WD RED @6TB each.
        Want: 8-bay, expandable, 14-16TB each same RAID.
        I write every day and ready every day. My RAID capacity is maxed (about 1TB space left).
        I’m torn EXOS and IronWolf Pro.
        When you say, “recovery service”, are you saying a service provided, or a software package included inside of the HDD? If it’s a service, mail in, or something like that, it’s not a factor for me.
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      96. Do not get your hopes up

        Since 2017 20 TB HDDs are coming and coming- they are just around the corner. And yet it is second half of 2021 and we are stuck with 18 TB
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      97. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/QaU7tZfoBhCXdRTWGQtbea.png Considering they are years off their own roadmap, I’d say the chance of 50TB drives in 2030 are slim to none..
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      98. Thought they said years and years ago they would have these drives out by now but yeah a 100TB if it’s still only going through a 1GB lan & only has 250mb itself, isn’t going to be that useful, unless for archive storage. I also just hope these drives still have long life as with more complexity, you’d think there is more to go wrong. Saying that though please bring these to market sooner than later if nothing else hopefully drive $perTB will go down and NAS units will hopefully increase their transfer rates etc etc
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      99. The only thing I hate about spinning HDD is that transfer speed has virtually stagnated for over a decade.
        All the improvements in density, actuators, etc and they still barely saturate the SATA bus at best.
        Luckily but over a decade late IMO there is finally a very slow push away from the SATA interface for spinning rust and small increases in speed. But its going to be data centre only at first and damn expensive, which mean if consumers get it, it will be years from now and cost too much.
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      100. I was thinking of getting a large drive and outing everything on there and backing that up with a duplicate drive. I can run Plex off of my night hawk. You mentioned not putting all your eggs in one basket? What would you recommend for people who might not want a NAS system just yet?
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      101. Great future hard drive video, I look forward to seeing these.
        I’M COMMENTING BECAUSE:
        This is about Eddie The Web Guy’s videos. Generally, he is great, he understands what hes talking about, and teaches it well. The thing is, unless I really desperately need the info on his video’s, I last about a minute. Why?
        The sound quality literally drives me nuts and I just click away.

        I mentioned way back that his microphone needs an upgrade, badly … and here I go again months later, trying to impress that this needs to be dealt with. The space he uses (in front of his windows is nice) is fine, but either the mic placement or its quality, needs adjustment or change.

        If he has a good mic … we cant tell. If he does, it needs to be closer to him, a lot closer … even to the point where its in the shot. We dont care if we see a mic.

        What we are hearing too much is the bounce in the room and the mic is picking it up. If he is closer to the mic, or the mic is better … the initial direct sound will over-ride the bounced sound.

        No, he doesnt need to smother the area in sound deadening foam or anything, just get the mic closer, or get a focused shotgun condensed mic and point it right at him.

        We dont care if we can see the mic, we need to hear him clearly … priority one … full stop.

        To add to it, he has a fair accent and a slight characteristic to his speaking voice where it can be a struggle to hear what he is saying, if the mic sound also sucks … it’s a combination that makes for challenging instructional videos, where hearing and understanding the details is all that matters.

        I’m certainly not complaining about the accent, honestly dont care if theres an accent, l but to hear the info past the accent, the sound has to be good.

        If learning the subject of a specific video isnt crucial, I just dont casually watch his videos, it just takes to much effort to hear him.

        Thats it, just trying to improve the channel.
        He needs a better sound setup.
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      102. Massive drives are cool and all, but from a home/small business perspective, my main concern is drive failures/life expectancy. You’re part-way through filling the drive for example, and it fails, now you’re out big dollars. Also, big drives need big backups/offsite or cloud drives/images. Might be more economical to have more enclosures and smaller drives to distribute the risk of failures and minimize downtime. And how long would a RAID repair take on four or more 100TB drives I wonder?
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      103. One difference though also is that the Exos does not offer data recovery like the Iron Wolf Pro. So technically could justify the price difference that way as well.
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      104. Can you mix Ironwolf Pro drives with EXOs in the same NAS? I have 3 Ironwolf Pros and like the price to performance of the EXOs but wasn’t sure if I could mix them. Thanks..
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      105. Hello! I want to ask about ironwolf pro. Can i use it for external hard drive ? Also is it worth the price with reliability and data storage compared to Barracuda Pro? Thank you so much
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