Seagate IronWolf 4TB, NAS, Internal Hard Drive, CMR, 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s, 5.400 RPM, 256MB Cache, for RAID Network Attached Storage, Data Rescue Services (ST4000VNZ06)

This review is for the Seagate IronWolf 4Tb model. Amazon groups reviews for drives of varying capacities for the same model family together, so hence the clarification. My first experience of a Seagate internal drive was when I purchased the 8Tb Ironwolf a couple months back (See my review here on Amazon). Since then, the drive has functioned perfectly. That drive is being used in my NAS and since the review of that drive, I have upgraded my 13 year old NAS to a new unit. However, i recently reached a point where I was running low on space on my existing 4 WD Red 4Tb drives, so wanted to add another WD Red 40EFRX model. Searching Amazon and other resellers, I couldn't find this exact model available any more, since being replaced by the WD Red Plus 40EFZX. I wanted matched drives, despite my new NAS using a RAID implementation not demanding this. However, being perhaps old fashioned, I really wanted identical drives. What to do? Well, I could add value to my old NAS by installing the 4 WD Red's I have and sell it. With that goal in mind, I looked to replace the WD's with new 4Tb Ironwolf's. Having been impressed with the 8Tb Ironwolf I have as a stand alone drive in my NAS, I was further tempted by the 20% cheaper 4Tb Ironwolf's compared to the WD Red Plus equivalents, no mean saving when looking to purchase 5 of them! Amazon was selling the Seagate Ironwolf's for just £80 at the time of purchase. This was just too good a deal to ignore, so I purchased 3 of them. Oddly, and something I've never encountered before, Amazon was restricting my purchase to a maximum of just 3. There appeared no stock limitations to account for this, though. That put me in a pickle, but thankfully the wife had her own Amazon account and so I was able to obtain the remaining couple of drives at the aforementioned excellent price. So, how do these compare to my old WD's? Before that, a word on packaging. I've read a few reviews on Amazon complaining about how Amazon ship drives. Be assured that all 5 of the drives ordered, as well as the 8Tb one a couple of months back, all arrived in robust boxes. Perhaps the most surprising thing about these 4Tb Ironwolf's is their size. They are noticeably smaller and lighter than my old WD's. The casing appears slimmer, especially towards the connector end of the drive. They still conform to standards, so will fit into systems, but I'd never seen a drive so noticeably different in its size before. The WD drives definitely feel heavier and more solid, but they are 5 years old, so perhaps use more platters to achieve the same capacity, I'm not sure. I haven't benchmarked these drives, but I understand these Ironwolf's are faster than their WD counterparts and are, of course, all CMR type drives. They also boast an impressive cache size for such a relatively low capacity drive at 256Mb. The newest WD equivalent offers half of that, The Ironwolf also runs around 20MB/sec faster transfer rate at around 200 Megabytes/sec compared to my older WD's. These 5 new drives have all gone through many hours of cloning functions as I sequentially replaced each WD in my array with a new Ironwolf and then an 18.5 hours RAID expansion when adding the fifth drive. All has gone well. These drives run cool and quiet, although they are still noisier than my old WD's. I can hear the seek on these where I was unable to hear anything on the WD's I had before. Nothing major at all, but noteworthy all the same. On a slight tangent, when discussing noise levels, the 8Tb Ironwolf I do have ticks away when idle. It makes a click sound about every 6 seconds or so, so that may bother those seeking a higher capacity model in quiet environments. However, this characteristic is shared with my external 14Tb WD Elements drive, so I believe this clicking is a function of higher capacity drives. The 4Tb drives reviewed here do not exhibit such clicking sounds when idle an spinning. My new NAS now uses a pair of 120mm fans as opposed to the single on the old NAS. This appears to keep drive temperatures nice and low, even the 8Tb 7,200rpm Iron Wolf I was slightly concerned about when running in my old NAS, the temperature differential so far being only an extra 2 or 3C over the 5,400rpm Ironwolfs in the new NAS. For those like me installing these 4Tb Ironwolf's into their Synology NAS's, a word of warning. On my DSM 7.1 system, these new 4Tb Ironwolf's(Model: ST4000VNZ06) appear not to have the Seagate Ironwolf health Management feature available to DSM. The 8Tb IronWolf I have has this feature show up fine in DSM 7.1. As far as I know, IHM (IronWolf Health management) is a feature of all IronWolf drives, but I may be wrong on that front. Either way, if this model does come with that feature, Synology's DSM 7.1 currently cannot recognize it, so you will be limited to only an S.M.A.R.T test option on those. Other than that, those Seagate IronWolf 4Tb drives still offer excellent value for money and, so far, the 5 I have are working fine. As on my 8Tb review, I will update this one should any of the drives fail within, or soon after, the 3 year warranty period. In summary, these 4Tb IronWolf drives offer exceptional value for money along with excellent performance. At current prices, they are a tempting option for those wanting a desktop hard drive in the form of the WD Blue or Seagate Barracuda ranges. You will get superior performance and better reliability with these over their desktop counterparts.

Running this in a Synology DS923+ and it's been faultless since I installed it back in July. The IronWolf range is purpose built for NAS use so you get the vibration sensors and the optimised firmware for always on operation which is exactly what you want when your drive is spinning 24/7. SMART readings have been clean across the board and I'm consistently getting around 200MB/s sequential read which is bang on what Seagate advertise. Noise wise it's noticeably quieter than the older Barracuda I replaced, you can hear it working if the room is dead silent but it's not intrusive at all. The 8TB gives me plenty of room for media storage, backups and a Plex library. The 3 year Rescue Data Recovery plan is a nice safety net too even if I hope I never need it. If you're building out a home NAS setup you won't go wrong with these.

Arrived in plenty of time to test considering testing takes 6 hours for a 4TB drive and I bought 2. Well packed by Amazon in a suitable box in their little unbleached Seagate boxes with Manual and Warranty card. You dont get those from Marketplace sellers according to some of the reviews I have seen or new drives. Marketplace sellers tend to sell used drives with SMART reset and hardly any warranty left from crypto farms. These are the Genuine deal with full warranty as I have registered them. Update: Was advised by Seagate support to replace the two received as raw read errors were high for a new drive which was done next day by Amazon. But have since learned this is normal behaviour and its not errors its a count of reads. Pity Seagate support 1st line didn't know this. Performance is good, doing a full surface scan with Victoria HD and reading at 200MB/s on average and fast responsive sectors which you would expect from a new drive. Using in a USB dock which is the easiest installation there is and they will become backup drives for my PCs and Laptop with enough storage for all.

Bought 2 of these. 1st one came in great packaging and has been very reliable. 2nd one came in what looked like a renewal box (not the original packaging), upon running this one, immediately failed, wouldn't read or write, couldn't even run a health check on the disk, think the actuator arm was actually broken. Had to return this one as I paid for a brand new one, but surprised this was even a sellable product considering the condition it was in. Only need to plug it in to realise how broken it is. Amazon returns was fine so will give 4 stars 🙂

Simply work, straight out the box and in idle mode silent.

Very easy to fit easy to use and set up nice big storage for the price worth the. Money

Excellent product , work extremely well , Well packaged arrived in tact .

If i am honest, I have avoided Seatgate for many years- probably 20 as I had a clutch of drives all starting to fail at the same time, but that was nearly 20 year ago. They are still a little louder I feel that the WD offerings, but I like the fact that it comes with 3 years (I think) data recovery protection which is a nice touch- otherwise I would have prob just gone WD again. Read/write times are around what you would expected for spinning SATA drives, averaging about 120mbs across my network when moving off the old PC server to this - but that transfer could have been the source drives speed also- I have yet to test from say an SSD or NVME drive. So far so good- like any HDD my experience is if they are going to fail, its usually early- these are setup as a raid 1 in my new NAS server- and will be keeping my most precious data- namely all of my dig pics of the kids and us. To be safe I always keep a second or 3rd backup across other machines- and will prob also look to put some on some kind of cloud storage to be safe. If anything changes Ill update- I am hoping and have been told that their reliability is now considerably better than previous years- I would think that is true because of the free data recovery they are offering with these drives. As with all amazon items- came speedily (next day) and they were very well packaged to ensure minimal/no risk of damage in transit.