Reliable hard drive: Seagate Exos X18 review

In our digital age, when the size of data grows every year, you cannot do without large storage. Especially if you are a fan of keeping data on your PC, be it photos, videos, music or games.

In recent years, hard drive manufacturers have been able to optimize technology through the use of tiled magnetic recording, thinner platters and helium gas media, and release consumer models up to 18 TB.

Succeeded in this and the company Seagateby introducing the model Seagate Exos X18 (ST18000NM000J) by 18 TB, which recently came to our test. The price on the Internet at the time of this writing started from 72 thousand rubles. Thanks to the active Chia miners. Manufacturer’s warranty – 5 years.

SPECIFICATIONS

The HDD in question is great for corporate solutions such as cloud data centers or networked storage systems. It should also become a reliable storage device for your home PC.

The disc is shipped in standard anti-static transparent packaging. Its weight is 670 grams. The connection to the computer is carried out via SATA-III at a speed of 6 Gb / s. There is also a model with a SAS interface (operating speed – 12 Gb / s), but it costs at least 8 thousand more.

Seagate Exos X18 has 256 MB of buffer memory. The rotation speed is 7200 rpm, and the disk itself is completely sealed due to the use of helium and the recording density of 9 platters using 18 heads. This model has an MTBF of 2.5 million hours and a maximum continuous transfer rate of 270 MB / s.

TESTS

To test this HDD, we used the following PC configuration:

  • MSI MAG B560 TOMAHAWK WI-FI motherboard
  • Processor: Intel Core i5-11400F @ 2.60GHz
  • RAM: 16 GB DDR4 3000 MHz
  • System SSD: ADATA SX8200PNP
  • Test HDD: Seagate Exos X18 (ST18000NM000J)
  • Video Card: nVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Founders Edition
  • Operating system: Windows 10 Pro ver. 2004

The device was tested in Crystal Disk Mark, Crystal Disk Info, AS SSD, AIDA64 and Anvil’s Storage Utilities applications. During the tests, the HDD worked in SATA / 600 mode.

In the classic Crystal Disk Mark, the Seagate hard drive performed very impressively in sequential tests, slightly above the manufacturer’s claims. So, Exos X18 demonstrated 277 MB / s for reading and 271 MB / s for writing.

Copying a 45GB video folder from the system NVMe SSD to the Exos X18 took about 3 minutes. Copying took place at an average speed of 250 MB / s. At the same time, the disk is very quiet, does not stand out against the background of the general system noise, and no characteristic clicks are heard when loading data. The temperature rose to 36 degrees. Not under load, the HDD keeps the temperature of 32 degrees in the NZXT H440 case.

TOTAL

The Seagate Exos X18 is an excellent and reliable hard drive for organizing home storage of photos, videos, music or games. Excellent speed performance, low temperature and noise levels, as well as a large volume make it one of the best data warehouses on the market. Except that the price bites, but against the background of the popularization of the Chia cryptocurrency, this is not surprising.

Author: Sergey Dyakonenko (Madnfs)

Read also: SEAGATE IRONWOLF PRO 16TB Large Hard Drive Testing