16TB Seagate ST16000NM001G Exos X16, 3.5" Enterprise HDD, SATA 3.0 (6GB/S), 7200RPM, 256MB Cache, 4.16ms, OEM

Product Information

Before we images of Austin Power's laser sharks dancing in our heads, we get to talk about the current product lines that just expanded capacities to 16TB. Seagate's three NAS-optimized series, IronWolf, IronWolf Pro, and Exos X now ship in the new capacity. Other than the label, the three series look identical and often times pricing is similar. Today we will look at what differentiates the three and then see each in action over in the native environment, over a network. Both have the same workload (550TB per year), reliability (2.5 million hours MTBF), warranty (5 years limited), and of course the same capacity.

The Exos X doubles the IOPS in every OIO compared to the two IronWolf series. This doesn't come as a surprise since this is the series' home turf. FWIW, I also have 8 Exos 16TB drives in my NAS, and it's been in service (as my home NAS) since early 2020, with no drive failures (they're currently hanging off an LSI 9211-8i SAS HBA flashed with P20 IT firmware). Seagate has recently refreshed the IronWolf and IronWolf Pro NAS product lines with new 16TB flagship drives. Launched at the same time was the new 16TB flagship drive for the enterprise range, the Exos X16. At launch, the Exos X16 drive is the world’s highest capacity 3.5-inch 7,200 RPM drive for the enterprise sector that is readily available. Any new experiences with the exos drives (16/ 18 tb)? I'm considering buying them as well, so very interested! When you register your IronWolf or IronWolf Pro, you trigger Seagate's Rescue Data Recovery Service. This is a free feature for the IronWolf Pro series for two years and an optional add-on for IronWolf and Exos X.Don't use RAID: https://www.truenas.com/community/r...bas-and-why-cant-i-use-a-raid-controller.139/

I haven't seen that either. Other than one drive I had replaced under warranty, the rest of the drives in my array have Load_Cycle_Count values around 1300 with over 21000 power-on hours. With the introduction of the X18 platform, Seagate introduced a new part number for 16TB Exos drives - ST16000NM000J. It's not much different than the X16 ST16000NM001GHardware recommendations: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/hardware-recommendations-guide.12/ The webserver test shows similar performance between the three sets of drives tested today. The Exos X shows a little more inconsistency compared to the two IronWolf series in preconditioning with a heavy workload. This is likely due to the different cache algorithm. Final Thoughts We start to see significant performance variation in the random workloads. The first thing you will clearly notice is the Exos walking away from the two IronWolf models and in some workloads double and tripling random read performance. Less obvious is the IronWolf outperforming the IronWolf Pro. For many, this is unexpected, but we've noticed the IronWolf performing better in some workloads over the years with other capacities. ScratchSSD 1 * High Endurance SSD for temp files for some applications. No write amplification and I don't care about the data

Failing that what are peoples experiences with noise level of these drivers compared to 8TB WD reds? TrueNAS Scale for beginners: https://www.truenas.com/community/resources/welcome-to-truenas-scale-beginners-intro.208/ Current pricing makes the Exos X series more attractive in performance-focused deployments, but you do lose some consumer/prosumer features like two years of free data recovery found on the IronWolf Pro, and advanced disk health monitoring found on both IronWolf and IronWolf Pro series. https://www.seagate.com/files/www-content/datasheets/pdfs/exos-x18-channel-DS2045-2-2010US-en_US.pdf

So I'm looking at getting a few of these for my my NAS but I'm having trouble finding any data on noise levels. I'm currently running mostly 8TB WD Reds which according to their data sheet run 27 dBA idle and 29 dBA seek (average). As with most of the Exos product range, the X16 is available with either 6Gb/s SATA or 12Gb/s SAS interfaces. There are two SATA models, the standard model (the drive we are reviewing here) which is the ST16000NM001G – and then there is a SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) version, the ST16000NM003G. ST16000NM001G is on the X16 platform (the highest capacity on X16). It has 9 disks with 18 heads, each disk about 1.8TB. ST16000NM000J is based on the X18 platform, which has 18TB as the highest capacity. It also has 9 disks with 17 heads, each disk about 2.0TB. So this is the same as an 18TB drive, just with 1 headless. Terminology and Abbreviations Primer: https://www.truenas.com/community/threads/terminology-and-abbreviations-primer.28174/