Skip to content

Seagate · NAS drive · ST3000VN006

Seagate IronWolf 3TB

Built for 2- to 8-bay NAS boxes, and that's as far as Seagate's rating goes.

Capacity
3 TB
Recording
CMR
Speed
5,400 rpm
Warranty
3 years
Workload
180 TB/yr
Rated for
Up to 8 bays
Failure rate
No failure data

Good for

  • A NAS in the lounge or a bedroom
  • RAID, SHR and ZFS rebuilds

Not for

  • Boxes with more than 8 bays
  • Heavy daily writes (180 TB a year rating)

Updated 27 Oct 2026 · Method 2.0

Is the IronWolf 3 TB right for you?

It's a good match for a 2- or 4-bay box that sits somewhere you can hear it. Drives at 5,400 rpm run quieter and cooler than the 7,200 rpm lot, and they're still quick enough for gigabit. Recording is CMR, the right kind for RAID and ZFS.

Watch out for

Treat that bay rating as a hard limit. Anything larger wants a pro or data-centre drive. Warranty's three years and the workload rating is 180 TB a year. At 3 TB that's 60 full passes of the drive a year, and a monthly scrub uses twelve of them before you've written anything.

There's no Backblaze data worth quoting here. On paper it makes 23 dB at idle and 25 dB seeking. Seagate lists 3.2 W at idle and 3.7 W working, which comes to 28 kWh a year for a drive that idles around the clock. Four of them in SHR or RAID 5 give 9 TB usable, or 8.2 TB once Windows has done its binary maths on it.