An expandable NAS doesn’t include hard drives. By placing special NAS hard drives, you can make sure that all your backups, movies, photos, and personal files are safe. Both Seagate and WD have a NAS hard drive, namely the Seagate IronWolf vs WD Red. We’ll explain the differences and similarities between these hard drives.
Seagate Ironwolf vs WD RED Overview
Seagate Ironwolf
IronWolf is designed for everything NAS. Get used to tough, ready and scalable 24×7 performance that can handle multi-bay NAS environments across a wide range of capacities.
Seagate IronWolfs use Seagate AgileArray firmware. This means you’ll have a better RAID array, error correction, and more. Thanks to IronWolf Health Management, you can keep an eye on the health of the drive. Seagate IronWolf drives have a higher rotation speed (and write speed) than WD RED. However, they do get a little warmer.
WD RED
There’s a leading edge WD Red drive for every compatible NAS system to store your precious data. With drives up to 6TB, WD Red offers a wide array of storage for customers looking to build a NAS solution. Built and tested for personal and home NAS systems with up to 8-bays, these drives pack all the punch you need in one powerhouse unit for storing, archiving, and sharing.
Western Digital uses WD NASware. This ensures a lower power consumption and a good error correction. WD Red has a slower rotation speed than Seagate IronWolf so you can’t transfer files as quickly. WD Red becomes less hot, though, and uses less power.
WD RED vs Seagate Ironwolf – The Biggest Difference
Capacity
Usually, this would be one of the easiest ways to differentiate between two different hard drives when trying to make your decision, but the Seagate IronWolf and WD Red both offer an impressive range of storage sizes. We are looking at the 4TB versions here as a starting point for your NAS but options up to 16TB are available.
Plus, with NAS you can keep adding to your capacity by throwing in extra drives.
Performance
When deciding on a hard-disk or a solid-state driveway, the operation would be among the most crucial variables to be considered. An SSD with excellent performance may empower your computer to run faster and improve PC performance.
| Seagate IronWolf (6-12 TB) | Seagate IronWolf (4TB) | WD Red (8-12 TB) | WD Red (4 TB) | |
| 24/7 operation | Yes | |||
| Spindle speed | 7200 | 5900 | ~5400 | |
| Cache | 256 MB | 64 MB | 256 MB | 64 MB |
| Max sustained data transfer rate | 210 – 240MB/s | 180 – 210MB/s | 210MB/s | 180MB/s |
Independent testing by other publications such as Hardware.info have also shown that the Ironwolf drives are much faster than the WD RED drives.
However because of the fact that WD and Seagate have been selling SMR based drives without disclosing it, past benchmarks may not be the best indicator. Since CMR based drives have overall better performance than SMR drives (the datasheets confirm this too), Seagate Ironwolf drives win here.
Noise
Not the Seagate IronWolf, though! It’s been designed to produce practically no noise, and even with its advanced disk rotational speed, there is minimal vibration to contend with thanks to the Agile Array firmware. Comparably, the WD Red reduces both vibration and noise levels using the 3D Active Balance Plus and is therefore another quiet option.
However, if you want total silence then you’ll have to compromise on the speed, as with any fast hard drive you’re going to notice a slight purring. Don’t be alarmed if you hear a slight ticking noise as this is usually just the disk when it’s reading the file as it loads.
Reliability and Warranty
With both SSD models, It will come with a three-year limited warranty. You’ll also have expert customer service on hand via phone, chat, email, or their community forum, to answer any questions you may have.
Price
Deciding you want to upgrade your hard drive is one thing, but actually forking out for new parts for your PC is another. These costs can soon start to add up, which is definitely something to consider if you’re looking to add more than one new component, for example, if you’re building your own PC. A hard drive might not be the most expensive addition to your setup, but you’ll still want to get the most for your money whichever one you choose.
It might be surprising to know that, despite being released almost 6 years earlier, the WD Red costs pretty much the exact same as the Seagate IronWolf. Their differences do nothing to differentiate them in terms of price, even though they affect their performance. It seems to us an obvious choice to go for the Seagate IronWolf which has more to offer for the same amount of money, but we’ll save our final say for the conclusion.
Both the Seagate IronWolf and the WD Red hard drives are readily available for purchase on Amazon, but keep in mind that these prices are for the 4TB versions. If you’re looking for higher storage capacity, you’ll end up paying more for the privilege.
So which one did I choose?
From the above chart about WD Red vs Seagate IronWolf specifications, you can easily know which NAS hard is better for you.
The Seagate IronWolf has been optimized for all of your data backup and gaming needs. If you’re looking for a hard drive with lots of storage capacity and faster loading times, there’s no denying that this is the better choice. It gets slightly warmer than the WD Red, but this is probably the only thing we could find fault with.
On the other hand, the WD Red offers a quieter drive, which some PC users may value over faster read speeds. Ultimately, your decision will come down to what you’re looking to get out of your hard drive, and either one would be an excellent choice to upgrade your computer.
FAQs
Is WD more reliable than Seagate?
Many people have been using WD hard drives for years. And they assume WD hard drives have terrific reliability with very low failure rate. However, according to a study from BackBlaze, it shows that Western Digital’s drives were overall the least reliable among HGST, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital.
Do Seagate drives still suck?
The Seagate Barracuda drives were among the very least reliable drives according to their tests and data from a collection of nearly 50,000 drives. We’re talking about an extremely high failure rate here, even higher than 100%, and in some cases above an astonishing 200%.
Can a hard drive last 20 years?
Generally speaking, you can rely on your hard drive for three to five years on average. A compelling study that proved this statistic comes from the online backup company Backblaze who analyzed the failure rates of 25,000 running hard drives.
Conclusion
After reading this article and with those questions in mind, Memoright hope you have a better understanding of which hard drive is going to be better suited to your existing gaming setup. Let’s check memoright.com to get more information about SSDs now.
