ST4000VN008 · ST8000VN004 · ST10000VN0004 · ST12000VN0008 · ST16000VN001 · IronWolf Pro ST10000NE0004
Seagate's IronWolf is the drive in most Synology and QNAP bays and in a good many small servers: ST plus the capacity, VN for IronWolf and NE for IronWolf Pro, 1 to 24TB, with recovery timing tuned for a small RAID. It fails at the heads like any other drive, and it has two stories of its own. The 10TB ST10000VN0004 and ST10000NE0004 on SC60 firmware timed out on cache flushes under load and dropped out of ZFS and Synology sets until Seagate's SC61 fixed it in 2019; and in early 2025 IronWolf drives were reported sold as new with tens of thousands of hours in their FARM logs, following the Exos affair. One failed IronWolf imaged for the rebuild is £300 + VAT after the free look, fixed in writing, 3–4 days at the bench.
Rather talk it through? An engineer answers the bench line
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| Family | Model strings | Interface, capacity and notes |
|---|---|---|
| IronWolf 1–8TB | ST1000VN002, ST4000VN008, ST6000VN001, ST8000VN004 | Air · the commonest NAS drive on the bench |
| IronWolf 10–12TB | ST10000VN0004, ST10000VN0008, ST12000VN0008 | Helium · SC60 timeouts on the 0004 |
| IronWolf 16–24TB | ST16000VN001, ST18000VN000, ST20000VN00E | Helium |
| IronWolf Pro | ST10000NE0004, ST16000NE000, ST20000NE000 | 7,200rpm · Exos-class mechanics |
| What you see | The usual reason | Where that leaves you |
|---|---|---|
| CRC errors or drops on a 10TB drive on SC60 | The cache-flush timeout | Update healthy drives to SC61; image a failed one |
| FARM hours far above SMART hours | A used drive sold as new | Not a fault; the set shares the history |
| Predictive failure | Thresholds crossed; still reads | Replace on a healthy set; image first on a degraded one |
| Failed by the controller; spins | Answered one read too slowly | Usually reads on the bench; image it |
| Clicking | Failed heads | Power down; matched donor in clean air |
| Rebuild stalled on this drive | Unrecoverable read errors | Imaged with weak areas last; set rebuilt from images |
A case number goes on the parcel and a number on every drive the day it is opened, matched to the slot you wrote on it. An engineer settles what has actually happened before anything spins: the interface, the sector format, the firmware, the security state, and what the controller was saying when it stopped. Back to you come two things together: a straight note of what is liftable and what is not, plus one figure, fixed and written down. Accept it, or decline and owe us nothing.
A member drive is read on the equipment its interface needs: a SAS imager for SAS and NL-SAS, a SATA imager for enterprise SATA, a terminated SCSI or Fibre Channel controller for the legacy drives, a PCIe adaptor for NVMe. It is never put back in a server, and never in a controller that will try to rebuild. Drives that answer at full speed are imaged; drives with weak or failed heads go to the clean bench, where matched donors are fitted and the service area repaired before a sector is read.
Every drive is imaged sector by sector, head by head where it needs it, with the bad areas last. Drives with 520- or 528-byte sectors are imaged as they are and the extra bytes stripped from the image, never the drive. Self-encrypting drives are unlocked on the imager with the key you supply. From then on the originals are not touched again.
Where the set is healthy and one member was the job, the image goes back to you on a fresh drive, sector-identical, ready to rebuild from. Where the set is the job, every member is imaged and the array reassembled in software from the images: order, chunk size, parity rotation and the reshape point read from the drives' own metadata, the file system repaired on the virtual volume, never on the originals. The array work is covered in full on our RAID array site, and it happens on the same bench.
What was recovered is listed for you first, and only then does a bill exist. Approve the list and it is invoiced; turn it down and it is not — and where nothing has come back, most jobs carry no charge at all. Recovered data travels home on fresh media bought in for your job, with the postage at our end. Your case is not closed until you have opened the files on a machine of your own.
The first drive had failed heads; the second dropped during the repair with pending sectors. Both were imaged, the first after a head swap on the clean bench, and both images went back on fresh drives with the SHR set reassembled from them on the NAS bench.
Illustrative example — replace with a genuine caseFor the drive out of it. For the unit and the SHR layout, our NAS site covers it in full; the same bench does both.
On healthy 10TB drives, yes. On a drive that has failed, no; the update writes and does not repair.
Yes, for £300 + VAT, onto fresh media, sector-identical.
£300 + VAT for one drive after the free look, fixed in writing; sets of two to four from £500 + VAT.
Looking at it is free. Back comes a list of what opened and what did not, together with a single price to finish, set down in writing while you are still free to say no. On most jobs an invoice only follows the data. Until that list reaches you, leave the server off and the drives in their slots.