Oceanside Store on Amazon has the 18TB WD Ultrastar DC HC550 7200 RPM on sale for $309.85
https://www.amazon.com/HC550-18TB...B08NWF1X6P - now $309.85 and sold by Oceanside Store.
If you want a solid 18TB drive filled with helium and provide better performance than shucking many of the WD external drive deals from BestBuy, this is a decent drive model. I purchased 4x of these drives from Oceanside store on Amazon for $315 in the beginning of May and they the full 5 year US warranty after registering the drives.
Some pros compared to WD Element drives:
- These come with 5 years of warranty
- Have faster transfer rate than WD Element drives
- These are helium filled and these run as cool as WD Red 8TB (5400RPM) yet they're running at 7200 RPM. Compared to WD Red Pro 18TB which run at around +40C, these run around 30C during intense reading/writing.
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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.
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.
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.