Question 1

Has packaging improved? Foam, protection around drive? Thanks

Accepted Answer

March 2021. I ordered two 8TB IronWolf drives for a DS220+ NAS. Both arrived in one large amazon box with plastic air-filled bags and brown paper to stop the two separate drives from moving about. Each of the two separate boxes inside the amazon box had Seagate barcode stickers on the boxes. Inside those boxes the drives were very well protected by foam rubber with each drive sealed inside an anti-static bag. Packaging and protection doesn't get much better than that. Skip forward two weeks to April 2021 and I bought a third IronWolf 8TB drive for an external enclosure. I went to the same amazon product page and purchased the same drive I had bought a month previously. This arrived with the drive in its anti-static bag. That was wrapped in a single sheet of bubble wrap and that was inside an amazon brown paper bag. This drive I sent back to amazon immediately as a matter or principle since my expectation that the drive had survived shipping without being damaged was zero. To their credit amazon accepted the return no questions asked and my refund was issued in less than four hours. TLDR; Packaging on identical drives is *very* variable and is actually a bit of "roll the dice and hope you get a good result".

Question 2

What is the difference between the 4tb hdd st4000vnz008 and the st4000vn008 or is it a typo?

Accepted Answer

Hi there, If the 'z' shows in the part code this ASIN is a frustration free packaging which Amazon recommend and prefer as it's a reliable source.

Question 3

Are these 4tb ironwolf disks reliable in  nas?

i've had bad experience with seagate in the past but don't trust wd reds because of the smr tech .

Accepted Answer

Two-part answer: I received a dead-on-arrival originally, which was the first time in over 20 years that has happened to me. So, thumbs down. But part 2 is, the replacement arrived without fuss, was installed without bother, and has been running flawlessly in a 4-disk HP Gen 8 microserver NAS ever since (which, admittedly, is only about a month at this stage). It's running at 34 Celsius, whereas the WD Reds it cohabits with are running at 36, 35, and 33 Celsius, so it's fitting in fine and running smoothly. Only time will really answer your question, of course. The third part of my two-part answer is: because of the WD SMR shennanigans, the reliability of Ironwolfs is *almost* irrelevant: they are your only other practical alternatives to WD Red Pros with their inflated costs for the promise of CMR -and I don't think rewarding WD for their behaviour in this matter is an option.  TLDR: the one I have (eventually!) has worked fine and I have no qualms about it: its SMART numbers look fine to me, for example.

Question 4

Will this drive be compatible with Mac?

Accepted Answer

Yes, you can use this in a Mac - although this drive is for Network Attached Storage rather than desktop computers.
There are cheaper 4TB drives in the IronWolf range more suitable for desktop installations.

Brand	Seagate
Product Dimensions	14.71 x 10.19 x 2.62 cm; 648.64 g
Item model number	ST4000VN008
Manufacturer	SEAGATE
Series	IronWolf NAS
Colour	HDD
Form Factor	3.5-inch
Processor Brand	Seagate
Computer Memory Type	Unknown
Hard Drive Size	4000 GB
Hard Disk Description	Mechanical Hard Disk
Hard Drive Interface	SATA 6 GB/s
Hard Disk Rotational Speed	5.9E+3 RPM
Wattage	8.1
Power Source	System powered
Are Batteries Included	No
Item Weight	649 g
Guaranteed software updates until	unknown

Seagate IronWolf, 4TB, NAS, Internal Hard Drive, CMR 3.5 Inch, SATA, 6GB/s, 5,900 RPM, 64MB Cache, for RAID Network Attached Storage, 3 year Rescue Services, FFP (ST4000VNZ08)

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