Seagate Exos X18 Enterprise Class, 18TB, Enterprise Internal Hard Drive, SATA, 3,5" 6Gbit/s, 128MB cache ((ST18000NM000J)

I've been reliably using this product for 2 years in a JBOD box with only this HDD in it. I paid 14.1GBP/TB for it at the time of buying in Jan 2024. I get reliable speeds of upto 100MB/s for big files I was told to keep this drive on as much as possible so I've always left the power on for the JBOD box. I have attached the rest of the data from CrystalDiskInfo in the image. The only downside is that the drive is really noisy. If you've never heard a mechanical data center drive spin, you won't know what you're walking into when you buy an Enterprise HDD. Ofcourse the drive wasn't original and typing the warranty number from the drive on seagate site said it wasn't meant to be sold separately, but 2 years of use has done it justice. Besides, I use backblaze so my data is cloud backed up anyway

I was unlucky that the drive was DOA but felt I had to write a review about Maestro Tech who supplied it. Their support throughout has been top notch, from helping me to try and get the drive working to assisting with the return and credit. Shame the drive didn't work as, at just over £300, this is a very aggressive price for a Seagate 18TB.

I purchased this drive from the seller MELVYN-EU. When attempting to register this drive on the Seagate website, I was told that there was a problem with the warranty. When I spoke with a customer rep, I was told "If you hover your mouse on the red writing you will get the message that product was originally sold as a part of a larger system. Please contact the system manufacturer or your place of purchase for warranty support. In other terms, this drive was not meant to be sold as a separate stand alone internal enterprise disk but was removed from a larger system, (a server most likely) that was made by Dell, HP, IBM, etc, it was dismantled and then sold in pieces." Seagate drive are good, but do fail, and I have had to use warranty support on several drives in the past. Purchasing a drive, without full Seagate warranty support is an absolute no, no for me, and so this drive is going back. Attached are pictures of the chat with the Seagate rep.

Easy to install ? Yes. It's a standard size 3.5in SATA HDD Storage capacity - phenominal for the price. Speed is more than acceptable and it is constant, not like many SSD's So I give it a wholehearted 5 star review. Time will tell on its longevity but it supposed to be enterprise grade so I've no concerns there. It runs at 39'C all day and every day. Now the tricky bit. Make sure the drive can be installed into your system. I'd planned to put it in an external 5-bay hub but realised that the hub can only take up to 16GB drives per slot. Luckily, I could fit it into my PC which recognised the full capacity while giving SATA speeds. The additional cost for an extra 2TB over a 16TB drive was a no-brainer.

After my 4TB HDD died after almost 10 years of beign used almost 24x7, and seeing 18TB for just under £300, I took the plunge and ordered 2 of these. (I always would recommend buying twice the storage you need so everything is backed up!) First impressions is that this is a bit noiser than my old drive, and generates a bit more heat. However nothing to be concerned. More of a concern is reliability. Perhaps I was unlucky, but out of my 2, one was DOA, which has been shipped back to Amazon and awaiting a refund. In the meantime, I ordered a 3rd drive, which does work thankfully. Now I've set up one in each server and it was a breeze, easily recognised. One thing to note though is that plugging this drive into my old USB-SATA dock, WIndows 10 didn't recognise the drive as present. Plugging the drive directly into the SATA ports on my servers however worked fine, and after a day, my data was copied across and everything is working fine. My transfer rate of data to these drives (directly from another SATA drive on same machine) was about 160MBytes per second. 18th Dec 2022: I noticed the price has since dropped to under £280 a few days after my purchase, which makes it even better value. I will however be testing the reliability of this over time and will be updating my experiences in due course...

Great drive for NAS only. Not so great for Windows gaming! I thought maybe I could game on this drive. All the games run perfectly fine with no lag at all. Planet Coaster and The Forest. Even GTA 5 all run fine with out any issues. But opening the games up takes sometime to open up at times from the desktop and even sometimes it doesn’t respond when you click on the game icon. I think the drive takes time to respond or when it’s doing to much at once. Anyway I have decided to get a proper PC hard drive instead. I thought for an experiment to see if it would work. Since loads of people online say it would be fine but will experience slower read speeds. For the size you get more TB then normal PC hard drives. Anyway now I know you can’t. I will stick with PC drives now on.

I have replaced an 8TB Iron Wolf (4 years old) drive in my 4 Bay Windows Server with this 18TB Drive. The Iron Wolf was still working fine, but better safe than sorry. Smooth transition of installation and data transfer. Perhaps of interest - Back in the day, I remember paying £230 for a 240MB (MB not TB) PATA drive! I installed it 3 months ago and I am very pleased. Quiet, reliable - and slightly faster over my CAT 6 network than the previous 8TB Iron Wolf Drive. Will it last the course - only time will tell! Highly Recommended.

Large capacity drive, great price. I was not apparent at time of purchase, but since I have had a problem with the SATA connector that these are not new drives they are re-certified.

Slow starter, good data rate

Dead on arrival. The header is stuck and disk does not spin. Did not expect this from Seagate.

Happy with product, price and delivery! Will buy again!

Bon rapport qualité/prix, c'est un produit reconditionné & re-certifié.

Primero los compro (4) y luego miro las opiniones 😂 Veo el desastre que ha sido para mucha gente... Y me echo las manos a la cabeza pero bueno me la juego y han llegado hace nada. Los he verificado, es cierto que llegan en una caja muy cutre con muy poca protección para ser un disco duro de este calibre pero bueno. He comprobado el SMART con Crystal Disk y efectivamente los discos no se han usado, solamente contaban con 1 encendido (el actual) y 0 horas de uso. Eso es bueno. Es muy difícil borrar o respetar el SMART pero es posible. Aún así me meto en la página de Seagate para comprobar el estado de la garantía. A mi sorpresa, la garantía no era completa de 5 años sino de 4 años, hasta septiembre, faltando unos 3 meses de la garantía completa. 3 de los discos tenían la misma fecha y uno de ellos un par de días de diferencia. Dicen que para seagate la garantía empieza desde el momento en el que sale de fábrica. También los he formateado y he comprobado que realmente los discos sean accesibles y que se pueda escribir en ellos. Pese a la caja cutre en la que llegan y las comprobaciones realizadas dudo mucho que sean de segunda mano o refurbished de centros de datos como dicen algunos comentarios. Dudo muchísimo que en 3-4 meses (vamos lo que falta de garantía) les hayan dado tanta caña como para venderlos ahora de segunda mano. Pero me quedo tranquilo porque les quedan garantía y si te pasa algo Seagate te tiene que dar uno original sí o sí. Bueno espero haberos ayudado con mi experiencia. Os puede salir bien o mal pero por lo menos ahora sabéis cómo comprobarlo. Si os sale mal pues lo devolvéis y ya está... Sinceramente flipo con la cantidad de gente que compra estos discos tan grandes y nada baratos y no los comprueban... ACTUALIZACIÓN: me he puesto en contacto con seagate para actualizar la garantía porque faltaban 3 meses y ahora ya tienen los 5 años que dicen. Piden la factura y te resetean la garantía a la fecha de la factura. Sí, es un poco cutre el proceso pero también entiendo que es un mecanismo de seguridad adicional para ellos.