Seagate Unveils Exos X18 18TB Enterprise Hard Drive
by Ganesh T S on September 17, 2020 8:00 AM EST
Seagate recently introduced their 18TB flagship IronWolf Pro hard drive for SMB/SME NAS units. Today, the company is unveiling the Exos enterprise version of the same drive. The Exos X18 goes head-to-head against the Western Digital WD Gold 18TB EAMR-based drives introduced in July. Seagate is also taking the opportunity to expand their application/storage server lineup with a 2U 12-bay model - the Exos AP 2U12 Compute and Storage System.
The Seagate Exos X18, like the IronWolf Pro 18TB, is a 7200 RPM CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drive with a 256MB multi-segmented cache. It contains additional reliability features, and firmware tweaks to provide features geared towards data centers and enterprise storage arrays. These include caching tweaks to optimize the drive for low-latency large data transfers, and a power balance feature that allows customization of the power consumption for the best possible watts/TB given a particular set of workloads. The MTBF increases from 1.2M in the IronWolf Pro to 2.5M hours for the Exos X18.
The maximum sustained disk transfer rate also increases from 260 MBps to 270 MBps. Seagate quotes maximum operating power of 9.4W, with idling average at 5.3W. The IronWolf Pro 18TB idles at 5.2W.
Seagate also has a lineup of products under the Exos Systems tag - these include multi-bay rackmount storage enclosures falling under three different categories - the AP series for compute and storage with an in-built x86 server CPU, the X series RAID enclosures, and the E series JBOD enclosures. Today, the company is introducing a 2U12 AP model - as the name suggests, the 2U rackmount server supports up to 12 3.5" drives and comes with two 10GBASE-T ports and two gigabit ports. The server board is based on the Xeon v5 v4 family, and CPUs with TDP of up to 85W are supported.
Coming back to the Exos X18, Seagate offers it in both SATA and SAS versions. The SATA version has a MSRP of $562, undercutting the WD Gold by $30.
Source: Seagate
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melgross - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I hope these are better than the 16GB version. I bought two a few weeks ago from Newegg. One was bad. They took it back and sent another. It was bad. That’s two out of three. When I called, I was concerned at how much bad luck I might have had, so I asked how many had been returned because they didn’t work. I was told that other than the bad one I still had, 12 were returned that MONTH because they were bad.Well, that was way too much. So I’ve returned the new bad one and the good one, which was beyond their normal return period . They took them both back. I’m now waiting for them to get them and confirm my refund on the bad one, and store credit on the good one. The person I spoke to understood that I didn’t want to trust that good drive, particularly in a raid.
I’ll have to decide what drives to get as replacements. Any suggestions as to a reliable 16GB 7300 rpm drive? Right now, I’m too exhausted to think about it.
firewrath9 - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
you really only have 3 options, Seagate, WD/HGST, and Toshiba, you might want to look at WD/HGST's 16TB ultrastar or the toshiba MG series. Other than those, i don't think any other options exist.Samus - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
The only WD products worth considering are those with Hitachi DNA in them. The coolspin-based WD Red's and anything He6-based is incredibly reliable. WD 2.5" drives are abysmal and their marketing with 3.5" drives makes it nearly impossible to know if you are getting SMR-recording drives or not before you install the drive and check the firmware.ravib123 - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
16GB? 7300 RPM? Not to be a jerk, but is this a total joke or did you actually not check what you write before you click submit?melgross - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
You are a jerk. Ok, a typo, that I missed. Wow! It changes everything I said, and nobody understood what I meant, except for the stable genius, who is you.JessusX - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
I don't think you can call it a typo, when you did it twice. And you called a RAID a raid...not to be a jerk.MrVibrato - Thursday, September 17, 2020 - link
Ah, milking the typos for all they're worth...Beaver M. - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Welcome to the world of autocorrection. Youre about 10 years late to still cry about spelling mistakes and typos on Internet comments. You do know what people like you are called, though, right?heffeque - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
I must be big brain. I understood everything you wrote, melgross.Don't let bitter people mess with your spirit ;-)
RealBeast - Friday, September 18, 2020 - link
Agreed heffeque, but just imagine if the comments had an edit function. ;)