The IronWolf drives are rated for NAS use. There are some key differences between the IronWolf and other drives in our lineup. For comparison, we will use our desktop drives, the BarraCuda.
The BarraCuda comes with a 2 year warranty, the IronWolf comes with a 3 year.
The BarraCuda is rated for 8 hours a day x 5 days a week use and up to 55TB of data per year
The IronWolf is rated for 24x7 use and up to 180TB of data per year
There are other differences, depending on things like capacity, speed, etc. The biggest difference is that NAS drives are not ideal for desktop use. People sometimes like to use them this way because they tend to have more robust features and longer warranty, but their firmware is engineered for different uses. NAS drives are expected to work in NAS enclosures, usually in RAID arrays. Part of their performance optimization for those uses means that when a NAS drive runs into an error, it's less likely to aggressively try and correct those errors, "thinking" it can just pass to the next drive in the array, which means when used incorrectly in a desktop setup, it can compile errors faster which could potentially hurt the longevity of the drive.
If you would like a good workhorse (work...fish?) desktop drive with some of the beefier features people like about NAS drives, you may want to look into the BarraCuda Pro. These drives have a 300TB of data per year workload rating, 5 year warranty, 2 free years of rescue services, and (if you are talking 6TB capacity to go in-line with what you were looking at) 256MB cache.
Regardless of which brand/drive you go with in the end, thank you for considering Seagate!
