Ironwolf Pro vs Exos

Hi guys,

I’m looking at Ironwolf Pro drives vs Exos drives. Why are Ironwolf Pro drives rated for a wider operating temperature band to the Exos? Exos is 5-60C while the Ironwolf Pros go from 5-65. Everything else seems to be pretty similar (MTBF and non-recoverable read errors and ability to turn off head parking). I heard that you void the warranty if you run the drives above their rated temps and it gets hot where I am. The simple solution would be monitor temps and simply shut down the computer on hot days automatically once the limits are approached, but extra breathing room seems nice. Exos cost a lot less though.

I’d be surprised if there was any hardware differences between them, the Ironwolf Pro & Exos drives are identical far as I know. Both also have a five year warranty.

I agree, spec wise they look identical so I agree with you. I’m just puzzled by the temp difference.

My guess is firmware / tolerances, get whichever is cheaper its spinning rust so i mean it going to fail early or last pretty long in my exp

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With temps that high I don’t think an extra 5 degrees is that significant. I’d go with whatever drive has the best warranty and fits the budget. I don’t know about Ironwolf Pro except they are indeed an award winning drive and all the rave it seems. I’m happy with my little 12 TB Exos. Never had a problem with it. How hard can it be to run a fan directly over a hard drive?

I’ve had HDD temps reach 66C before. That’s in a case with 3x140mm intake fans and 2x80mm dedicated exhaust fans attached to the HDD bay.

Geez, were those over 10k RPM drives or something like that?

No, bottom of the barrel Barracuda running in a naughty RAID configuration. Naughty because they aren’t advertised to work in more than one HDD per enclosure. Approaching 20,000 hours, still working.

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Ironwolf Pro & Exos are the same drive, only differentiated (as noted earlier by others) via the firmware settings.
If you run a Synology then you would want the Ironwolf as they have some flag or settings to share smart details.
I run the Exos drives in my unRaid server and they work fine.

Depending on your appetite for cost vs risk might consider manufacturer recertified and save a substantial amount of $ up front. You lose out on the 5yr warranty for a shorter one so there is a trade off.
I do not have any affiliation with or relationship with drive brands or resellers but have had good experience purchasing from serverpartdeals.com
In their case, if you buy an Exos, manufacturer recertified then the reseller will provide a 2yr warranty.

Back to your original question. The same drives, different firmware.
Good luck!

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If those are shingled drives, the issue isn’t that they don’t work the first time, but that they can’t rebuild an array if one of the drives fails, due to the design of the drive’s platters.

Rambles

That must be a pretty terrible airflow setup, though. Low-tier drives generally 5400rpm and don’t require much airflow.
I used a 3x5.25" to 5x 3.5" enclosure where the drives had about 1mm of air gap between them, with only a single 120mm fan, with front grill, dust cover, and an extremely restrictive intake and 4x running 7200rpm Seagate Constellation SAS drives, and they didn’t manage to hit 60c. Which is good, because they stop working at 66c, which I later found out when I forgot to plug the fan in.
66 is pushing it for HDD temps, and you should be concerned. Is the fan at the front actually running?

All the fans are running and the case is excellent. But as I said, it gets toasty where I live, so running the PC in those conditions means high temps are inevitable.

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