Newegg - Seagate Exos X20 20TB $279.99 + $1.99 shipping

It's very cool how spinners have continued to advance, quietly.

I'm running two WD Gold 16TBs in RAID 0 and the result is something that saturates a SATA3 bus.

A SATA SSD is faster with randoms, I'm sure. But hard drives are hardly a painful experience as storage solutions nowadays.
 
Well, me media server currently has four 8tb drives and is running on space, so I ordered four to redo my raid5 array on my media server. Should be here in a few days. Then the hard work begins....rebuilding it.
 
If this was a WD drive, I'd probably pick up a couple.....Thankfully they aren't, don't think my wallet could take this hit right now. =P
 
20 TB in a single HDD is pretty nuts. If it writes at 285 MBps that's 17.7 hours to write 18.2 TB to fill the drive. Assuming best case scenario of streaming writes.
 
ochadd said:
20 TB in a single HDD is pretty nuts. If it writes at 285 MBps that's 17.7 hours to write 18.2 TB to fill the drive. Assuming best case scenario of streaming writes.
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Same is also true for re-syncing a RAID with these things in it. Good chance for a second failure.
 
These things are $285 today at newegg. Slightly worse deal than the OP, but I think this is the best price since.
 
These are constantly going on sale. I will recommend them, but I've only had them in use for like 2.5 months. No SMART errors or any weird hiccups so far.

Additional context/input: I've been running eight of this 20TB model in a ZFS RAIDZ3 array. They perform well, but they are pretty noisy (even in a "sound dampening" case) compared to typical consumer hard drives. Check your warranty on Seagate site, when I got mine the 5 year warranty was a few months short. After contacting Seagate (and they actually had a really convenient SMS text option) they updated the warranty to reflect 5 years from my purchase date.

At $280 - $290 or whatever I think this is a no brainer for people wanting high capacity spinning rust. Enterprise quality drive, CMR, 5 year warranty, fast, and rated for 550TBW per year. Some other enterprise drives are rated a little lower on the yearly TBW but take that with a grain of salt.
 
Dopamin3 said:
They perform well, but they are pretty noisy (even in a "sound dampening" case) compared to typical consumer hard drives.
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Waiting to hear that. I used to run mostly Seagate. Have tried buying newer Seagate drives and keep returning them, because of the noise. They tend to run hot, too. I can't stand the noise and don't trust them for longevity. Glad you argued for the 5 year warranty.
 
I have only used Seagate drives for the last 7 years. I even have about of the old style 8TB Archive drives that I bought from 2015. And every one of them still work to this day. Love Seagate. I know I am only one person with about a 25 drive count. But only lost one drive. Otherwise, they make great drives
 
I still have a 2Tb Seagate Barracuda spinner for bulk on a B550, even use a WD Black P10 4Tb Gamedrive in USB 3.0, it's a 5200 rpm drive spinner that is made to take with you on the go! great for laptops! runs Fortnite great on AM5 from USB 3.0 and no shutters. AMD driver says I was doing 111fps in 1440p from the old P10 spinner.
 
Honestly, once finding out about serverpartdeals, rarely look at buying new drives unless it's an insane deal. This aint bad...But you can nab two 18tb Ultrastar Manufacturer refurbs with 2 year warranties for 180 a pop on server part deals. Three for the same price here for the two 20tb exos drives...

But have to admit, not too shabby for brand new drives, just never been a big fan of seagate...they have been the bane of my existence ever since their post golden days...all my failures (not many mind you) have been seagate for the past decade and a half...lol.
 
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sleepeeg3 said:
Waiting to hear that. I used to run mostly Seagate. Have tried buying newer Seagate drives and keep returning them, because of the noise. They tend to run hot, too. I can't stand the noise and don't trust them for longevity. Glad you argued for the 5 year warranty.
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Any of 5yr warranty enterprise will be noisy and hot to you then as these are pretty much the same as my HGST, WD, and Toshiba enterprise drives.

Dopamin3 said:
At $280 - $290 or whatever I think this is a no brainer for people wanting high capacity spinning rust. Enterprise quality drive, CMR, 5 year warranty, fast, and rated for 550TBW per year. Some other enterprise drives are rated a little lower on the yearly TBW but take that with a grain of salt.
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$14.5/TB approximately and yes a solid deal for enterprise drives via the consumer pipeline. It would be just as solid a deal if it was any of the other enterprise 5yr drives too like HGST/WD and Toshiba. The specs of all of them are pretty much the same and they work the same imo too in terms of physical characteristics.

Ikasu said:
Honestly, once finding out about serverpartdeals, rarely look at buying new drives unless it's an insane deal. This aint bad...But you can nab two 18tb Ultrastar Manufacturer refurbs with 2 year warranties for 180 a pop on server part deals. Three for the same price here for the two 20tb exos drives...

But have to admit, not too shabby for brand new drives, just never been a big fan of seagate...they have been the bane of my existence ever since their post golden days...all my failures (not many mind you) have been seagate for the past decade and a half...lol.
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Serverpartsdeals can be a mixed bag as people on the sth forum have discovered, so sometimes the real warranty and real manufacturer behind it definitely feels more confident even if it is the same drive.

The Seagate Exos line is enterprise through and through ime. I'd put them right up there with my HGST, WD and Toshiba enterpirse units.

w1retap said:
Thanks, got 2 bundles of 2. Need 4 20TB drives for a mirror to transfer my SnapRAID to a new pool and start fresh with new drives. My current drives are 2-4TB and between 6 and 11 years old lol.

Not too excited about them being Seagate.. but we'll see how they do.
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They should impress you (unless they were mishandled in shipping) as they're just as good as any other enterprise drive.
 
SamirD said:
Serverpartsdeals can be a mixed bag as people on the sth forum have discovered, so sometimes the real warranty and real manufacturer behind it definitely feels more confident even if it is the same drive.

The Seagate Exos line is enterprise through and through ime. I'd put them right up there with my HGST, WD and Toshiba enterpirse units.
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I just can't trust seagate anymore. Also based on backblaze's Q2 failure report...To me it's justified...lol.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/

Now I know all drives have failures, but considering the elevated failure rate across multiple ranges of capacities and models across their Exos line turns me away. Now there aren't many other branded drives on the list for this specific quarter. Three WD's, bunch of hitachi's and toshiba's...But as I've checked the ever changing drive list over the last few years when their report gets released, one aspect always remained true...Seagate had considerable higher failures across a wide range of their drives compared to the competition if memory serves me right. Became a routine to affirm my first hand bias...hahaha.
 
Ikasu said:
I just can't trust seagate anymore. Also based on backblaze's Q2 failure report...To me it's justified...lol.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q2-2023/

Now I know all drives have failures, but considering the elevated failure rate across multiple ranges of capacities and models across their Exos line turns me away. Now there aren't many other branded drives on the list for this specific quarter. Three WD's, bunch of hitachi's and toshiba's...But as I've checked the ever changing drive list over the last few years when their report gets released, one aspect always remained true...Seagate had considerable higher failures across a wide range of their drives compared to the competition if memory serves me right. Became a routine to affirm my first hand bias...hahaha.
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This could be as simple as they are consistently getting damaged shipments from their vendor. Over the years the backblaze idealogy has moved away from it's original 'we're going to store stuff on consumer level storage devices with consumer drives' to what now is basically entry level enterprise with full out enterprise drives. And this means different suppliers and more consistent suppliers, who unfortunately, may keep consistently damaging shipments (or drop ships). Many of us have had the 'drive' in a box with a air balloon shipment and surprisingly the drive survives a doa test, but more than likely such shock does contribute to in warranty failures. Same thing if a pallet is dropped from 6" vs 2".

And let's face it, any drive ever made will absolutely positively fail. The question is how you're set up to deal with that eventuality. And if your set up is good enough, it won't matter if you get an odd failure or two here or there because of proper 3-2-1 backups, etc.

I remember Seagate in their heyday when Mr. Shughart was at the helm--nothing was better than Seagate--nothing. The day they removed him, they started fumbling around in the consumer line dominated by WD, et al. But what they still kept doing well was enterprise. Did you know that almost every single rack server in the world has Seagate 2.5" 10k and 15k drives in it? Yes, big data, important data, business running data--it's on Seagate enterprise drives. So fast forward to their release of the Exos 16TB SATA. I took a gamble after decades of avoiding their consumer crap (and everyone else's too) and all 4 are still strong even though they were some of the first few gen 16TB Exos released. And they were remarkably the same as my HGST/WD/Toshiba in terms of their 'noisy' growl as well as their beefy movements you could feel. These were true Seagates again. And if they were a fluke, well that time has passed because that was years ago and now there's generations of Exos and several more capacities. And ime, I haven't had any more RMAs than any of the other brands when dealing with the enterprise offerings. As always ymmv, but that's my experience. :)
 
Welp.. got my 4 drives yesterday night. 1 out of 4 works. 2 act like they want to power up and just click. One does nothing. Dropping them all back off at UPS here in a few minutes to return them. My Seagate experience still remains tainted. haha.. I'll wait for a deal on WD.
 
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I decided to get one of these a few weeks ago, actually, because of this thread. Been working like a champ. For all of the noise complaints, I can't really hear mine over anything else in the case. It's very fast, too, for a spinner.

Knock on wood, but HDDs almost never die on me. I still have an IDE drive that's ancient and works. Actually had a Seagate 320GB external a long time ago that I thought died, only it worked just fine when I took it out of the external enclosure and put it in my computer.
 
w1retap said:
Welp.. got my 4 drives yesterday night. 1 out of 4 works. 2 act like they want to power up and just click. One does nothing. Dropping them all back off at UPS here in a few minutes to return them. My Seagate experience still remains tainted. haha.. I'll wait for a deal on WD.
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I had two WD Gold drives that would do something similar. I could only intermittently get them to show up in the BIOS and never windows. I could hear them come alive. I had to clip a 3.3v wire on the SATA power lead coming from the power supply. Been running for years now. It took me a whole night of troubleshooting and Google to figure that out.
 
(I still have an IDE drive that's ancient and works.)

Old Timers just call it Ribbon Tape drive.
 
w1retap said:
Welp.. got my 4 drives yesterday night. 1 out of 4 works. 2 act like they want to power up and just click. One does nothing. Dropping them all back off at UPS here in a few minutes to return them. My Seagate experience still remains tainted. haha.. I'll wait for a deal on WD.
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How were they shipped? Sounds like classic shipping damage from insufficient packing and rough handling. I've even had this happen with RMA drives from manufacturers since they just send the box with the drive in it with that custom plastic shell on both ends. No one seems to understand that if you don't ship it right, you're going to ship it again (and eat the cost of the damaged goods).
 
StoleMyOwnCar said:
I decided to get one of these a few weeks ago, actually, because of this thread. Been working like a champ. For all of the noise complaints, I can't really hear mine over anything else in the case. It's very fast, too, for a spinner.

Knock on wood, but HDDs almost never die on me. I still have an IDE drive that's ancient and works. Actually had a Seagate 320GB external a long time ago that I thought died, only it worked just fine when I took it out of the external enclosure and put it in my computer.
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Nice. Yep, they are fast for HDDs, but that's expected in the data center so no surprise there. :)

I have some externals like that too that had a usb cable issue that made them seem like they were dying. Changed the cable and they worked great.
 
ochadd said:
I had two WD Gold drives that would do something similar. I could only intermittently get them to show up in the BIOS and never windows. I could hear them come alive. I had to clip a 3.3v wire on the SATA power lead coming from the power supply. Been running for years now. It took me a whole night of troubleshooting and Google to figure that out.
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Interesting. I have several Golds and have never had to do this (like a lot of times people with shucked drives would do).
 
cpufrost said:
Don't forget ESDI! ;-)
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Yes! Micropolis 170mb ftw!
ull-hi-internal-hard-drive-10.39__96022.1490147840.jpg


Today you can fit 8x 16TB SSDs in the same space--128TB--literally 12 orders of magnitude increase in ~40 years. :eek:
 
I had 8 of the 14tb exos, 5 of them failed over a 2yr period. I keep falling for the cheap seagate pricing but they consistently die on me every single time. On the flip side, Toshiba and HGST are absolutely rock solid.
 
paradoxical said:
I had 8 of the 14tb exos, 5 of them failed over a 2yr period. I keep falling for the cheap seagate pricing but they consistently die on me every single time. On the flip side, Toshiba and HGST are absolutely rock solid.
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Ouch. I Got a 10tb variant that showed smart errors a year into running it. Told myself not to buy it, knew better, but still did anyways...Let me down as expected.

Yet I have ten Hitachi's in the 5-6 TB range (Deskstar Nas before being bought by WD) that are still running strong with 60,000 hours or so on them. As well as two each of 10tb, 12tb, and 14tb WD White labels I schucked that have been flawless. Haven't used any Toshiba drives personally, but put them together for a few friends/clients with no issues so far. But safe to say I'll be staying away from Seagate...Probably going to load up on some 18tb Ultrastar manufacture refurbs from ServerPartDeals. At $180 a pop, with a 2 year warranty, the risk at least seems justified considering the track record they've provided me so far.
 
SamirD said:
Yes! Micropolis 170mb ftw!
View attachment 598444

Today you can fit 8x 16TB SSDs in the same space--128TB--literally 12 orders of magnitude increase in ~40 years. :eek:
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Those were awesome in delay start configuration to prevent excessive inrush when doing cold starts. Literally could be used for sound effects in movies from everything involving big iron to nuke plants going on line! :-D

And yes HGST / Toshiba FTW! So many of those from 4TB to 16TB in NAS and surveillance duties with nary a peep from SMART checks. The Ironwolf and Exos, OTOH, not so clean for sure.
 
SamirD said:
How were they shipped? Sounds like classic shipping damage from insufficient packing and rough handling. I've even had this happen with RMA drives from manufacturers since they just send the box with the drive in it with that custom plastic shell on both ends. No one seems to understand that if you don't ship it right, you're going to ship it again (and eat the cost of the damaged goods).
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They were in ESD bags which were in foam HDD holders and inside a box. Packing seemed fine, no box damage.
 
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