Seagate IronWolf 110

Seagate’s Ironwolf series consists mainly of conventional hard drives, but the manufacturer is now also adding SSDs to the mix. The series is aimed at NAS (network-attached storage) usage, mainly by only including high-capacity drives in the product lineup, as well as Seagate’s proprietary AgileArray firmware, which is optimized for NAS workloads. It’s unclear how this applies to the IronWolf 110 SSD, but it does come in high capacities and offer excellent endurance figures.

Specifications

The IronWolf 110 uses 3D triple-level cell (TLC) NAND Flash memory, which is less durable than the more expensive memory type MLC (multi-level cell). However, it appears that Seagate has included a great deal of spare capacity (overprovisioning) to even out wear and increase the drive’s durability.

Seagate doesn’t go into detail regarding the controller, but it includes DuraWrite technology, which has previously been used with LSI SandForce-based drives. The manufacturer does provide detailed specifications for each capacity:

Specifications, capacities, and features (such as DuraWrite) are similar to Seagate’s Nytro series of enterprise SSDs. DuraWrite is a form of compression technique that reduces the size of the data when it passes through the controller. So, less data is written to the NAND memory, enhancing durability and performance.

Performance

As always, the 6 Gbps SATA interface is easily saturated by modern SSDs, but this should be less of a problem in NAS devices, which normally have no options for higher-end interfaces or slots for M.2 or add-in card storage.

The Seagate IronWolf 110 is available in capacities ranging from 240 GB all the way up to a very large and somewhat uncommon 3.84 TB capacity. Performance is a bit lower in the smaller capacities and the highest IOPS figures are reached in the 1.92 TB model :

• 4K random read: 90K IOPS
• 4K random write: 65K IOPS
• Sequential read: 560 MB/s
• Sequential write: 535 MB/s

Power Consumption

Seagate has not positioned the IronWolf as a laptop SSD, so power consumption is not a high priority. As is usually the case, the power draw is higher in the largest capacities, at 3.5 W (active) and 1.2 W (idle) in the 3.84 TB model, compared to 2.3W/1.1W in the 240 GB IronWolf.

Endurance and Warranty

In a high-load NAS environment, endurance is one of the most important factors and the Seagate IronWolf stands out with much higher endurance numbers than most other TLC-based drives.

Endurance numbers in TBW (terabytes written):

• 240 GB: 435 TBW
• 480 GB: 875 TBW
• 960 TB: 1,750 TBW
• 1.92 TB: 3,500 TBW
• 3.84 TB: 7,000 TBW

The IronWolf 110 is also supplied with a 5-year limited warranty.

Expert Reviews

PCWorld:

The IronWolf 110 is a very good performer, carries a reassuring endurance rating and warranty, and it’s not prohibitively expensive like Optane offerings. And, despite the marketing, it’s perfectly usable in PCs and other non-NAS missions.