Packaging and Contents

We received our review sample just in anti-static wrap, without any boxed packaging. Hopefully, retail versions do feature a nice box.

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of metal to improve its durability and is only 7 mm thick, which ensures it will fit into modern notebooks.


The Seagate IronWolf SSD uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will, in such a case, work at reduced performance.


This is the first time I see thermal paste used on an SSD. We didn't encounter any thermal issues, so it's working well.


On the PCB, you'll find eight flash chips, the controller, and four DRAM chips. Eight empty spots on the back are reserved for the flash chips of higher capacity models.


The SSD controller looks much different from other controllers these days. You can clearly see the silicon chip and the green substrate around it. We reached out to Seagate for additional information, but their response was only "Yes, the IronWolf 110 has a Seagate in-house controller". The markings on the chip tell us that it is made in Taiwan, which means either TSMC or UMC fabricate it.


The eight 64-layer 3D TLC NAND flash chips are made by Toshiba using their BiCS3 technology. Each of these has a capacity of 64 GB.


Four Micron DDR3-1866 DRAM chips provide a total of 512 MB of fast DRAM for the controller to store the SSD mapping tables in.