With SSDs reaching a nice level of affordability, we can’t recommend any mechanical hard drive to be used as main system storage. But if you want a secondary drive with a ton of storage, Seagate IronWolf NAS drives remain unbeatable.
The IronWolf drives are state of the art as far as consumer hard drives go, leveraging PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) platters running at 7,200 RPM to cram up to 18 terabytes of data in a regular 3.5-inch form factor drive.
Being NAS-optimized drives, the IronWolf series doesn’t come cheap for a disk drive as it’s designed to withstand performance-intensive workloads involving constant read/write operations for days on end. They are, however, more reliable as a result, come in higher capacities, and perform well (for a hard drive).
In case you were wondering, higher-end series like the IronWolf Pro and Exos are meant for larger servers and prioritize vibration resistance over performance.
You can find IronWolf HDDs in capacities of 1/2/3TB (5,900 RPM, 256MB cache), 6TB (5,600RPM, 256MB cache) and 8/10/12/16/18TB (7,200 RPM, 256MB cache). Moreover, these drives utilize conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology instead of “shingled magnetic recording” (SMR), so you won’t get the write performance penalty associated with SMR, which manufacturers employ to produce cheaper, denser disks. Inevitably, this also means paying a small premium over budget drives. For example, an 8TB IronWolf drive will set you back around $160, while an identical capacity Barracuda can be had for $120.
A Worthy Alternative: WD Red Plus
WD added a ‘Plus’ tier to its Red series of 3.5-inch NAS HDDs following the SMR/CMR controversy. These CMR drives have been competitively priced with Seagate’s IronWolf across their entire range of 2/3/4/6/8/10/12/14TB models. There are, however, minor spec differences between the two, including RPM speeds and cache size.
WD’s Red Plus drives offer more cache in the lower-capacity models, but the Seagate IronWolf range come with a 5-year warranty, unlike WD’s 3-year warranty for the Red Plus series.
HDD Budget Option
If you simply want an inexpensive, barebones HDD, the Seagate Barracuda line has a variety of options to get you the most storage for your money. A capacious 2TB model can be had for just $50, or you can double the space with the $68 4TB version. The Barracuda is also available in 1TB, 3TB, 6TB, and 8TB variants.
The 2TB model of the Barracuda is the sweet spot in terms of speed, spinning at 7,200 RPM and 256MB of cache. The 1TB model spins at the same speed, but only includes 64MB of cache. The 3TB and above models slow down to 5400 RPM, but we think that’s reasonable for the price. A larger cache is useful for storing frequently used files without needing to keep them on the slower disk.