So far so good. The drives are reasonably quiet, a bit quieter than my WD Red drives, but they do run a couple of degrees warmer than the Reds at idle and under load. Both sets of drives are in the exact same type of QNAP enclosure and the enclosures are sitting right next to each other, so ambient conditions are about the same. I am a fan of Seagate drives and was eager to test out the new Ironwolf drives, as all of my other NAS-specific drives are Western Digital and HGST.
Only negative, which I will not penalize the drive itself for, was the horrible packaging job. These drives were sold by and shipped from Amazon directly, and considering the huge array of electronic equipment Amazon sells, they should know better. Drives were laying in the bottom of a fairly large cardboard box with a couple airbags loosely strewn on top. The things likely got banged around a fair bit during shipping. There were no shockproof endocarps in a box specifically designed for a hard drive (my Western Digitals and every other Seagate I have received had those), and not sure why Seagate/Amazon would think it's OK to transport drives like this. I have read reviews on this issue before with drives being shipped in thinly padded envelopes, and thought nah, that could never happen to me! Very disappointed. Fortunately, I didn't see any signs of damage and the drives are performing as intended, so we'll see and hope there are no future issues.
See attached photos. Also included one of a *correctly* packaged Western Digital drive.
| RAM | 2 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 2 TB Mechanical Hard Disk |
