Seagate Exos X18 18TB Enterprise HDD - CMR 3.5" Hyperscale SATA 6Gb/s 7200RPM 512e 4Kn Fast Format Low Latency with Improved Caching (ST18000NM000J)

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 soldas 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.

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...

I ordered two of these drives, they arrived in a box without any padding paper or bubble wrap. One drive was dead on arrival, while the second drive was recognised but started failing with data transfer (very noisy heads and drive errors, and immediately failed a Seagate Seatools drive check.I requested replacements and of the replacements one worked fine and the second was again dead on arrival. I requested a second replacement but this was not possible and only a refund made available. This is obviously inconvenient as I now need to source a second drive from somewhere else.

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.

I bought 2 18TB Exos to run in RAID on my server.I was shocked to see that the packaging they came in was a flimsy cardboard envelope with each disk i9n a anti stat bag and then inside a bubble wrap bag. Not the sort of packaging I expected for s £600.00 order.On installing one of the drives was dead and after running through all the usual checks it refused to work.Dissapointing and after reading a few reviews it seems I'm not on my own.Returned both for a refund.