The Seagate IronWolf 110 NAS SSD was first announced at CES 2019 and seems to go after a very specific niche of the storage market: NAS systems. In previous years, every serious HDD vendor has announced mechanical hard drives specifically optimized for NAS storage systems, so this move by Seagate is not surprising. Customers do definitely look for "Recommend for NAS" badges on storage products and seem to be willing to pay a premium for it.

Seagate's IronWolf SSD is built around an in-house controller from Seagate, which no doubt gives the company much better control over its internals to optimize it for the NAS use case. The storage itself uses well-tested 64-layer 3D TLC chips from Toshiba, which we've seen in many other SSDs as well; DRAM caching for the SSD mapping tables is included, too. Our real-life performance testing shows good performance results for this SATA 6 Gbps drive that are within a few percentages of other high-performance SATA SSDs.

While random IO performance is slightly lower than the best SATA drives, sequential performance leads the pack, basically guaranteeing 500 MB/s sequential speeds no matter whether it reads, writes, or is sent read/write transfers at the same time. Where the IronWolf 110 also shines is in its ability to sustain maximum write speed even when huge amounts of data are written. Other TLC-based SSDs achieve their maximum write speeds only for a short time, until their SLC cache is exhausted. Beyond that, they drop the write rate significantly, sometimes to below HDD speeds. The IronWolf 110, on the other hand, delivers a beautiful constant 500 MB/s, making it the best SATA SSD in this test as it even beats several PCI-Express M.2 NVMe-based models.

As expected, Seagate includes a five year warranty with the IronWolf SSD, and on top of that gives you a two-year data protection and recovery plan that lets you send in your drive to Seagate for free, and they will attempt to recover any data that was lost due to corruption, user error, water or fire. Obviously, there are no guarantees once damage happens, but it's a nice addition, especially considering the cost of such services. What I wish were part of the package is a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter since nearly all NAS systems take 3.5" disks, so you'll have to buy the adapter separately, which further increases price.

Priced at $125 for the reviewed 480 GB version, the IronWolf 110 is really expensive by today's standards. Our favorite 2.5" consumer SSD, the Crucial MX500, retails for $60, which less than half that of the IronWolf. If you are willing to accept lower performance, the cheapest 480 GB SATA SSD is around $45—a third of the IronWolf. Of course, neither of these drives come with the much higher write endurance and warranty of the IronWolf, and neither is "NAS-certified" either. So the question now becomes whether you consider your data important enough to pay such a premium. I'm not fully convinced, to be honest—of course, my data is important, which is why I have a solid RAID/backup strategy. But this also means that my storage is able to handle single-drive failure without issue or data loss. If that's the case, why not go with the cheapest storage out there, or get more storage for the same amount of money?

On the other hand, if your NAS is used in more than a single-user environment and performance is important to you, the outstanding write speed consistency of the IronWolf could be a godsend for members of your IT department who are tired of getting calls from people wondering why storage performance is so slow right now. If you do have the money to spend, the IronWolf 110 could definitely be a good option, especially since it comes in a wide capacity range of up to 3.84 TB—many cheaper consumer SSDs don't even get close.