yes it's a hard drive
SEAGATE IRON WOLF PRO TWENTY TWO TERABYTE ENTERPRISE NAS INTERNAL HDD
I wrote that in caps so you can imagine the youtuber shouting between each word. It was a written review but I feel like it's required.
First thing. Enterprise NAS drive? Sure. But it's SATA. Enterprise drives are not SATA, this is a prosumer drive. Can you use SATA drives in enterprise? Sure, but that doesn't make it an enterprise drive. This is unfortunately not new, as I have a few WD 1TB drives from a decade ago that do the exact same thing. Ironically, the enclosure they came out of also had some WD Black drives with "Desktop" written on them being used in the same array. Ultimately this is just a nomenclature thing, but it still annoys me.
Second thing, it's a mechanical hard drive selling for close to $20/TB. So the only valid reason to buy it is if you absolutely can not run more, less dense drives. Most people reading this review should not be buying this product. Do you need 120TB+ of raw storage but can't afford to run 8, 12, 16, or 24 disks to do it? But you can afford to pay 2x+ per TB? But you still don't want to pay 2-3x more per TB for enterprise SSDs and the gigantic performance boost and idle power consumption advantage from that? Plus the ability to safely power the drives down on a regular basis? This would all be less upsetting if "good value for money" was not explicitly said in the opening paragraph.
Third, how do you review a mechanical hard drive in 2024? Show the seek times across the span of the disk along with throughput and IO? Perhaps run it in any type of array people would be likely to use now, ideally ZFS, and show how it performs in resilvers? Nah, put it in a thunderbolt enclosure and just boot windows and do file copy tests lol. And PCMark of course!
Also, how the fuck were two of these running at 50C+ in a metal enclosure? Do new drives just run THAT much hotter? There's an old Google whitepaper on drive health in datacenters that showed 45C to be where temp starts to matter, but that was a long time ago. I don't know if there's updated info on this but 50C for sure seems hot. It's two drives and the middle of winter, what the heck are you doing?
I know this was marked as a "capsule review" or whatever but damn. Hard drive companies put all of their marketing into trying to get margins back on a product that has no real value to offer past "Price per TB" and "Not SMR" anymore. Hell they'll sell you SMR drives if they can get away with it! Trying to squeeze a useful review out of that is difficult at the best of times, but this might as well be marketing fluff. They didn't even get the drives for the effort! The review was "well I had to burn in these drives so I wrote a review".
Which like, that's cool and all, but when you're in that kind of position you gotta consider the outcomes of what you do. A mechanical hard drive nowadays either works about as you'd expect or doesn't. It's a pass/fail. Doing a whole review is basically just free marketing. Maybe a review just needed to be done, and this is what ended up being the review? I don't know. I obviously need to stop reading slop like this.