Buying Experience: Seagate IronWolf 16TB NewEgg

I recently ordered and shipped in a 16TB hard disk from NewEgg.

Some of my friends recommended me to buy an external hard disk, send to a forwarder and then ship it to Singapore. This is indeed a more affordable way to get disk space. However, I wanted to try something more “conventional”.

The hard disk was shipped by UPS and was delayed by two days. I was expecting my goods to arrive on Monday since they said that they only do deliveries on a business-day basis. However, I received it on Saturday afternoon. It was rather pleasant as I had tons of school stuff to do on Monday.

When the package first arrived, I was shocked and genuinely scared that the hard disk might have been damage. Mainstream media has shown and portrayed packages to be mishandled and just thrown around. Also, my package had no “fragile” label. Then again, would the “fragile” label change anything?

There was actually another box inside. And within that box, there was some other plastic air padding too. So, I guess it should be fine?

The second box inside seems fine

The actual product was finally packaged in an anti-static bag. Which is typical and expected.

I loaded it up on to the server and then hope that it wasn’t a Dead On Arrival hard disk. Sometimes, that happens and it sucks. DOA could happen due to bad luck or really poor handling in transit. Thankfully, it wasn’t a DOA hard disk and booted up fine.

During boot, it made some loud noises but I read reviews saying that it is normal as long as it isn’t constant. After several seconds, it became quiet and gentle.

In terms of performance, I did not run any stress test but just judged from a (bias) observation. Sequential read/writes are incredibly fast, this means that reading/writing large files can be done very quickly. I’m surprised at the speed despite it being huge. However, small files are insanely slow (1MB/s or so). So I do not recommend using it as an image server or holding small files.

Even though it is stated to be 16TB, the usable space is around 14.6TB.

sdb            8:16   0  14.6T  0 disk
└─sdb1         8:17   0  14.6T  0 part /mnt/data

Some of you might hoard even more data than I do or might even have a more comprehensive setup. However, I think the disk alone suffice for my casual usage for seeding Linux Torrents. I didn’t bother doing any software or hardware RAID or redundancy setup. If it breaks down, I’ll just ship in a new one. A little annoying but that’s about it. I might consider doing a software RAID 1 in the future.

Overall, I cannot really rate or compare it to my other disks as I’m not a frequent shopper or huge data hoarder.

If you’re interested, this is where I got the hard disk from: https://www.newegg.com/global/sg-en/seagate-ironwolf-st16000vn001-16tb/p/N82E16822184805

Author: Woo Huiren

Currently a student at National University of Singapore. I contribute to opensource projects - primarily PHP and Angular related. I write about PCF and PWS related stuff too.

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