18TB WD Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC550 7200 RPM 3.5" Hard Drive $309.85

I think you forgot the cons -- which was the multiple DOAs / possible reliability issues. Reviews are mixed and my data is important so not a good roll the dice for me on 4-6 drives.

are these loud? looking for a large capacity desktop HDD for data storage...

Seems like a good price for a drive this large. What's the catch with these?

Quote from musicman40nj : I think you forgot the cons -- which was the multiple DOAs / possible reliability issues. Reviews are mixed and my data is important so not a good roll the dice for me on 4-6 drives.

What are reliable ones you would suggest?

Quote from lapchern : What are reliable ones you would suggest?

Between counting on reliability of the drive and having a proper back up urself. Count on the backup. All drive fails eventually, you still SOL when u lost ur data on a low failure rate drive. If it account for anything, 5 years warranty on these dc drives.

Quote from tg9413 : Between counting on reliability of the drive and having a proper back up urself. Count on the backup. All drive fails eventually, you still SOL when u lost ur data on a low failure rate drive. If it account for anything, 5 years warranty on these dc drives.

5 years if it's a retail drive. A lot of these are OEM and do not have a manufacturer warranty.

Quote from mrkazador : 5 years if it's a retail drive. A lot of these are OEM and do not have a manufacturer warranty.

Just going by the seller's answer to one of the question on that amazon page. Or just punch in the serial here https://support-en.wd.com/app/warrantystatus , if it doesn't show relatively close to 5 years just return it. :0

Quote from musicman40nj : I think you forgot the cons -- which was the multiple DOAs / possible reliability issues. Reviews are mixed and my data is important so not a good roll the dice for me on 4-6 drives.

I think the cons can be said of all hard drives, regardless of models. The main issues is from non-reputable sellers on Amazon selling drives that are not from the US and have no warranties. The same can be said of even reputable websites like OWC, which sells enterprise drives that often don't have warranties.

This is why I specifically called out the Oceanside vendor as the drives I received were well packed in hard drive boxes, sealed, had zero hours of usage, and could be registered on WD support [wd.com] with the full 5 year warranty (which I highly suggest doing as soon as you've tested the drive).

Are these less reliable than other drives? These have higher Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) 2.5 million hours compared to most consumer drives, including their Red series which are only rated for a 1 million hours. Also taking a look at BackBlaze data from last year [backblaze.com] for the 16TB model, you can see the failure rate was very low when compared with other drives. Granted takes these results with a grain of salt, but it is a decent data point that the WDC drives had between 0.14% and 0.43% failure rate compared with various Seagate drives which are nearly double that rate. However, given more time, these would probably match that of the HGST drives given they're pretty much the same technology now.

Quote from colickyboy : are these loud? looking for a large capacity desktop HDD for data storage...

I would say these are actually quieter than X300 series Toshiba drives (7200 RPM) drives but slightly louder than the WD Red drives (5400 RPM). The biggest noise they make is after they come out of sleep or are powered on for the first time, but they're fairly quiet after they're running. They make some noise when doing intense read/write but not any worse than other drives.

Quote from musicman40nj : I think you forgot the cons -- which was the multiple DOAs / possible reliability issues. Reviews are mixed and my data is important so not a good roll the dice for me on 4-6 drives.

Nonsense. Relying on Amazon reviews for storage is like relying on a farmers' almanac.for weather. Companies sell MILLIONS of drives per year. With ultra rare exception, no drives are inherently unreliable.

There is an expected DOA rate for all products from all companies unless you're building something critical like pacemakers or commercial aircraft. And one could argue that the latter isn't even true anymore.

Quote from DarnCrazy : I think the cons can be said of all hard drives, regardless of models. The main issues is from non-reputable sellers on Amazon selling drives that are not from the US and have no warranties. The same can be said of even reputable websites like OWC, which sells enterprise drives that often don't have warranties. This is why I specifically called out the Oceanside vendor as the drives I received were well packed in hard drive boxes, sealed, had zero hours of usage, and could be registered on WD support [wd.com] with the full 5 year warranty (which I highly suggest doing as soon as you've tested the drive). Are these less reliable than other drives? These have higher Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) 2.5 million hours compared to most consumer drives, including their Red series which are only rated for a 1 million hours. Also taking a look at BackBlaze data from last year [backblaze.com] for the 16TB model, you can see the failure rate was very low when compared with other drives. Granted takes these results with a grain of salt, but it is a decent data point that the WDC drives had between 0.14% and 0.43% failure rate compared with various Seagate drives which are nearly double that rate. However, given more time, these would probably match that of the HGST drives given they're pretty much the same technology now. I would say these are actually quieter than X300 series Toshiba drives (7200 RPM) drives but slightly louder than the WD Red drives (5400 RPM). The biggest noise they make is after they come out of sleep or are powered on for the first time, but they're fairly quiet after they're running. They make some noise when doing intense read/write but not any worse than other drives.

If you're buying 6-8 drives or using that many drives, you should have drive redundancy of some sort. UNRAID offers 2 drive redundancy. I had a drive fail recently (Seagate), but no big deal. I have drive redundancy. And, they warrantied the drive (although I've been lazy completing it so lets see if I can still do it). So really, as long as you have drive redundancy and you warranty your drives quickly, you should be fine. 2 drive redundancy for me has been enough for awhile. Any drive issue I've had, I've been able to recover from due to redundancy. Better redundancy than trying to pray your drives never fail. a Slightly better failure rate won't save you imo.

Glad I picked this one up when the deal was still active: https://slickdeals.net/f/15777811-18tb-wd-elements-usb-3-0-hard-drive-black-289-free-shipping