Pros:
- No issues with test, installation, or data transfer
- Work well with Enterprise level Adaptec RAID card
- Good features on the 4TB and larger drives
- Personally experienced long term reliability of Seagate drives (Used Seagate for years, 25+ drives from 40GB to 3TB prior to this purchase)
Cons:
- Had to spring for the 4TB drives or larger to get the rotational vibration sensors (unavailable on smaller capacity Ironwolf drives)
Even though I have been using Seagate drives almost exclusively for all of my spinning disk drives, I was open to using any reliable manufacturer to replace my six 1TB Seagate drives with four 4TB ones. My drives run in a RAID 5, with a spare, in my personal server and longevity is important. I usually run drives 24/7 for about 5 years before they are replaced.
I was very close to purchasing four W brand drives due to the positive reviews, but finally settled on Seagate because most of the failures of Seagate drives seemed to be "infant mortality" failures (happen very early in the product life), where the W brand drives seemed to fail more often around a year after purchase (based on reviews on Amazon). This was true when I ordered prevously ordered a Seagate 3TB backup drive and it had failed out of the box. It was much more convenient for me to run hours of testing on each drive before installing them and replace them early rather than having the drives work well for a year and then having to submit a warranty claim.
When I received the drives, I ran approximately 13 hours of testing on each 4TB drive by performing a Long test using the Seagate tool. I checked the SMART data before and after and this test seemed to read all of the data from the entire drive because the SMART data after the test stated that 4TB of data had been read. Because of my RAID 5 and my backup strategy, this was enough for me to depend on the drives in my server and I installed them.
I configured the RAID 5, restored the backed up data to the drives, and then performed a build/verify on the RAID. The data transfer from the backup of my 2.3TB of data was much quicker than I expected and my server was back up and running. The drives are not louder than some of the loud parts of my server (server fans and a 300GB 15k RPM SAS OS drive), so I would not be able to provide details to how loud the drives are. The performance is improved over my six 1TB Barracuda 7200 RPM drives and I am pleased with how the transition was.
| RAM | 16 GB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 4 TB Hybrid Drive |
