- Seagate Exos 2X18 High-Speed 18TB Hard Drive Bridges the Gap with SATA SSDs
- Dual-actuator Mach.2 technology delivers 554 MBps reads with enterprise-friendly capabilities
- Drive adapts to workloads that need fast-spinning media rather than pure capacity
The Seagate Exos 2X18 hard drive is available to purchase at Insight priced at $659.99, and while it’s not exactly the Black Friday deal of the year, it’s $19 off the usual price of $679.
Aimed at enterprise and data center workloads, this 18TB model stands out for more than just its raw capacity: it’s fast.
The Exos 2X18 uses Seagate’s Mach.2 dual-actuator design, which splits the drive’s mechanics into two sets of independent actuators that operate in parallel. The result is sequential transfer rates of up to 554 MBps for reads and 528 MBps for writes, approximately double that of a typical 7200 rpm enterprise hard drive.
Speeds close to SATA SSDs
On paper, that puts this hard drive in the same territory as many SATA SSDs like the Samsung 870 QVO, at least for large sequential transfers.
A SATA SSD is still much faster for random access and latency-sensitive jobs, but for streaming data or backup jobs, the Exos drive narrows the gap much more than standard spinning drives.
The Exos 2X18 uses a 3.5-inch form factor with a 12 Gb/s SAS interface and 256 MB cache. Average latency is 4.16 ms and spindle speed is 7,200 rpm, backed by a claimed MTBF of 2,500,000 hours and a five-year limited warranty.
The drive is listed at 304 IOPS for 4KB random reads and 560 IOPS for 4KB random writes. Power consumption ranges from 8 W at idle to 13.5 W during sequential reads.
Helium-filled construction, PowerBalance and Power Choice features aim to keep temperature and power usage predictable in dense racks.
Seagate Secure support can help with hardware-based data protection in managed environments, although that will naturally depend on host integration.
This kind of performance comes at a high price for a single 18TB drive. For capacity-only buyers, slower nearline drives or high-capacity SATA SSDs will be cheaper per terabyte.
For workloads that are still tied to spinning media but benefit from increased performance, the Exos 2X18 offers an unusual middle ground between traditional HDDs and entry-level SATA SSDs.
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