I have a lot of NAS drives in the house, and I put most of those to work. More than half of the 250TB of storage is in active use, and an overwhelming majority of those drives are Seagate's IronWolf. I have a mix of both IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives, with sizes ranging from 6TB all the way to 18TB. I was just looking at the status of the IronWolf HDDs in the DiskStation DS1019+ — which I set up four years ago and has been running 24/7 — and noticed that these drives ticked over the 30,000-hour mark.
In all that time, the three drives have been faultless, and getting to that figure is an achievement in itself as I have this particular NAS housed in a rack server that doesn't have much in the way of active cooling. I've always recommended IronWolf drives because of their long-term reliability — I didn't have any issues with any of the 18 or so IronWolf HDDs I have in the house — so if you're looking to buy a NAS and need drives or want to increase the storage of your home server, IronWolf is a no-brainer recommendation.
On that note, the 8TB IronWolf is now down to $139, making it a great bargain. The 12TB IronWolf is also on sale, and can be had for just $199. If you're just starting out and don't need 8TB of storage, the 4TB IronWolf HDD is going for $79. On the other hand, if you're like me and are constantly running out of storage, the 16TB IronWolf Pro is now available for $249, which is its lowest price yet. And if that isn't adequate, the recently-launched 22TB IronWolf Pro is down to $379. Regardless of what variant you pick up, you're getting NAS HDDs that are inherently reliable.
Other than the 4TB drive (which spins at 5,900rpm), all the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro drives spin at 7,200rpm, and they have Rotational Vibration sensors that are designed to facilitate 24/7 use in a noisy NAS environment. Talking about noise, these drives are audible under load, so if you've got a NAS on your desk or in the same room, you will be able to hear the drives as they spin up.
There really isn't much else to talk about these drives. I used all of the best NAS HDDs launched in the last five years, and I always come back to IronWolf drives because of their reliability. And with the Black Friday sale, you can get your hands on these drives for a lot less than their usual going price, and that's always a good thing.
