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.

Bought two of these to fit in a Ugreen NAS (backing each other up under a RAID 1 configuration). They work perfectly and I've had no issues so far. They're obviously not solid state, so you do get a faint noise from them when they're idle, and you can hear the heads moving when they're under load, but this is entirely normal. If you don't want any noise, you'd need to go for pricier SSD drives. Seagate has a great reputation and I've found these really sturdy and well built. They inspire confidence.

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 🙂

This came in a custom box that was made to protect the drive during transit. I have been using the drive now for a few months and it's running error free so far. It just clipped into the cradle of my NAS and works well if a little on the noisy side. Not a real issue for me as my NAS is in the hallway next to my router and you only ever hear it when you are passing through. I use it for my Time Machine back ups of my MacBook, super simple and works works well. The large capacity means I can use it as a personal drive as well as storage to back up my Apple TV purchases as they can sometimes disappear from the service when the copyright holders remove the movie or swap it out for a 4K version that you need to re-buy. The point being there is a lot this drive can handle. I got this drive on the amazon 5 easy payments plan, that made this drive affordable to me as the option to pay over time is a great feature of Amazon when it's available. Makes it more affordable with smaller monthly payments. I trust the seagate brand as I have purchased their drives in the past and they always work well so only time will tell but I hope this drive is just as reliable as the others I purchased in the past.

Good

Pour internet

Working fine for the past three months, at software Raid-0 they are a bit slower than sata SSD on small files transfer, but with bigger files 10gb+ it is constantly faster, because when the SSD cache get filled the speed plunge

Good performance for RAID1 in my home server. Using it to boot VM's and serve media from, no issues!

I bought a 4TB Seagate Ironwolf drive to replace a WD drive I had that was giving errors in my UNRAID server. I have not bought a Seagate drive in a very long time. There was a period of time when Seagate was great, then a period of time when they were not so great. Anyway, I figured I would give Seagate a try again, especially since their drive was $15 cheaper than the same WD drive at the time. I received my drive and it was well packaged in protective packaging and inside a box. The drive had the same familiar footprint dimensions but was a shorter height which was interesting. Anyway, it didn't make a difference really. I removed my failing WD drive from the server, and then slotted this seagate drive in. I then started the server and once booted I assigned the drive to the correct slot in the menu and the server immediately began rebuilding the data on the new seagate drive. The drive had zero issues and zero errors on it from testing and rebuilding. It delivers good read/write speeds, but read/write speeds are really dependent upon many factors and what the server is doing at the time and so forth, so no detailed reports on that. The Seagate drive has been running 24/7 on my server for about a month now and not a single issue with it so far. The shorter height is interesting as it lets more air from the front facing fans pass between it and the drive above it, so that is a plus I suppose. If this drive holds up for 6+ months I will probably replace more of my server drives with Seagate drives. I have 2 other server drives coming on replacement time in near while, so I will be purchasing at least a couple more of these as they go on sale from time to time. I will need to compare the longevity of the Seagate drives with the WD drives. I've had good luck with WD up until about a year ago. Now, their drives do not seem to be of the quality that they once were. I get a lot of errors on some WD drives sooner than expected. Hopefully these Seagate drives fair better. Anyhow, so far so good. -------------------------------------------- UPDATE 15AUG2025 -------------------------------------------- So, a 4TB WD RED PLUS drive in my server went bad. The drive is 4 month old. It started about a week ago with some Sector Reallocation errors, then more errors over the days... then hundreds of bad sectors. I couldn't write data to the drive anymore, then the server kicked out the drive and refuses to start it up. I pulled the drive and tested on my PC... yeah, the drive is going bad, and it is going bad fast. I formatted it, put it back in the server (to trick the server into thinking it was a new drive), it rebuilt the data (after about 10 hours or so), and all seemed fine. But, soon after (within hours), it started acting up again. Definitely a bad drive. I can read data from it, but writing to it is challenging as it triggers a cascade of sector errors. Had to call WD today and RMA the drive... now I have to pack it up and ship it at my expense to get a replacement. Honestly, it's probably not worth it. I do not want another new WD drive in my server. I'll probably put in on light duty on one of the kids PCs or something instead. WD's quality has fallen into the toilet, and this new drive I will get from them will probably be another bomb waiting to happen. You know sticking in a new replacement into the server and waiting 10 to 12 hours for the data to rebuild is not particularly fun. WD I am not impressed in the slightest. This is particularly bad since this was a BRAND NEW RED PLUS drive. I not long ago replaced another WD drive with a Seagate. A brand new WD Red Plus..... and sitting next to it is a 5 year old WD Blue purring away happily without complaint... WOW! What happened to WD?!?!?! I have a 7 year old WD Green (they don't even make them anymore) that still works fine... and a new RED Plus can't make it past 4 months. Amazing. I even have a WD Blue that is years and years old in my security camera DRV/NVR recording 24/7... never has an issue...WD used to make good product. They are garbage now in my opinion. So, guess what I ordered as a replacement for the RED PLUS? Yep, I ordered a Seagate Ironwolf... even though WD is giving me a replacement (which you have to wait weeks and weeks for), I am paying for another Seagate to replace it with. The Red Plus will never see the inside of my server as I do not need the aggravation. It might be a long long long time before I ever order another WD drive again. Not until they sort out their quality again. My advice is to stay away from WD drives.... it is hit and miss with them. It is like playing Russian roulette with your data. So, we are down to two players left in the HDD world; Seagate and Toshiba. But, for now I am happy with Seagate. -------------------------------------------- UPDATE 06OCT2025 -------------------------------------------- I did finally receive the replacement WD RED Drive. WD sent me a white label drive instead of a RED label drive. It's basically the same drive but it has a label that looks like some printed on a thermal printer type label that they must issue when doing replacements or something. I didn't put it in my server. Instead, I have replaced 4 drives in my server with Seagate drives now. I even replaced my parity drive with a Seagate at this point, since it was a WD and started giving SMART warnings as well. So, the UNRAID server is almost entirely Seagate drives now and everything is running happy and smooth. The LSA HBA card has no issues with these drives at all and UNRAID sees them as normal SATA drives (normal as if they were connected to the motherboard directly)... just in case there are any UNRAIDers out there considering a LSA HBA card... I used a 9300 16i that was already in IT mode... zero issue with it with UNRAID... plug and play literally, the drivers come up automatically during boot. Anyway, the Seagate drives have been awesome so far.