Seagate Exos X16 16TB 3.5in SATA 512E/4KN Enterprise Hard Drive

Been a good buy, had this drive for over a year. Solid reliability, not as fast as SSDs, but no HDD ever is. It makes an unusual sound when spinning up, weirdly deep and bass. It's also bulkier and very heavy compared to most HDDs. Overall it's been great for bulk storage in a limited physical space.

I purchased two of these disks in April 2022 to use in a Synology NAS as effectively RAID 1. Although they are nominally 14 TB, in practice the NAS says I only have 12.7 TB available. When the disks arrived one worked fine, but the other was dead on arrival. I returned it to PB Tech and after some email discussion they eventually agreed to replace it. I'm happy with the final outcome as the replacement disk did work fine out of the box. One of my reasons for buying from PB Tech rather than from overseas was the expectation that it would be easier to deal with a local supplier in the event of any problems, and this turned out to be the case. Much appreciated, PB Tech. So far so good with the disks. They are relatively noisy when being accessed, but I have my NAS away ... MoreI purchased two of these disks in April 2022 to use in a Synology NAS as effectively RAID 1. Although they are nominally 14 TB, in practice the NAS says I only have 12.7 TB available. When the disks arrived one worked fine, but the other was dead on arrival. I returned it to PB Tech and after some email discussion they eventually agreed to replace it. I'm happy with the final outcome as the replacement disk did work fine out of the box. One of my reasons for buying from PB Tech rather than from overseas was the expectation that it would be easier to deal with a local supplier in the event of any problems, and this turned out to be the case. Much appreciated, PB Tech. So far so good with the disks. They are relatively noisy when being accessed, but I have my NAS away from me in another room so this is not a problem. The latest statistics from Backblaze (Q1 2022) record that the Annual Failure Rate is around 0.91%, which sounds pretty good to me.

A Solid Performer

Drive seems solid. I am using it to back up a huge collection of music I have spread across a dozen smaller drives. It will be filled when the build out is done. Copying large amounts of data for days at a time, the drive gets only warm to the touch, not hot like lesser drives. I feel pretty confident trusting this large a capacity of hard drive after seeing what this drive can do. I wouldn't hesitate buying again.

Fantastic NAS drive, but caveat emptor: industrial noise level

Using this in a NAS, upgrading from 4TB Iron Wolf Pro. They perform admirably and I especially can't beat them on sale for 1/2 off. Only unexpected negative is the noise, which I did read about but you kind of have to experience it firsthand... it's not ridiculously loud? But it's not quiet. One single drive being written steadily sounds almost exactly like the gutter runoff hitting the bottom of the metal downspout outside the home, a few minutes after a cloudburst. It can be a pleasant sound at the right time of day, etc., less awesome at others. I'm a litttttle afraid of what all four bays are gonna sound like. But: no pain, no RAID, I always say-ed.

Got 4 of these for a Synology NAS, and they are awesome

I'm loving these drives. They are a little bit overkill for a home NAS, but I wanted to build a shared volume that could take better advantage of my 10g network. I have 4 of them in a RAID10, and I'm loving the performance. In terms of noise, my only comparison is an array of 10TB Ironwolfs, and these Exos are louder. The Ironwolfs were never loud enough to be heard over the quiet NAS case fans, but the new Exos can be heard when they seek. I imagine most people buying enterprise drives don't care about noise, but when I was trying to decide on buying these drives (which were cheaper than the equivalent Ironwolfs), I couldn't find noise level data published anywhere. I would say the noise isn't bad, but I definitely have been moving frequently accessed shares back ... MoreI'm loving these drives. They are a little bit overkill for a home NAS, but I wanted to build a shared volume that could take better advantage of my 10g network. I have 4 of them in a RAID10, and I'm loving the performance. In terms of noise, my only comparison is an array of 10TB Ironwolfs, and these Exos are louder. The Ironwolfs were never loud enough to be heard over the quiet NAS case fans, but the new Exos can be heard when they seek. I imagine most people buying enterprise drives don't care about noise, but when I was trying to decide on buying these drives (which were cheaper than the equivalent Ironwolfs), I couldn't find noise level data published anywhere. I would say the noise isn't bad, but I definitely have been moving frequently accessed shares back to my old array to keep these new disks from constantly seeking during the day. If I didn't have that choice, I would probably look into moving the NAS farther away from my desk. One of the 4 drives I originally ordered died during the initial scan that was performed while building the array. This actually caused kernel panics in my NAS that rendered the web interface inoperative until I removed the offending drive, so next time I will definitely run extended SMART tests on the individual drives before adding them to an array. The RMA on the dead drive went fine. I don't have a problem with drives arriving DOA every once in a while, as statistically this is just a fact of how hard drives are built and shipped, regardless of the model or brand. And the 4 I ended up keeping are working great!

Great price but at the expense of seek noise

I bought two of these for my NAS device because the price is MUCH lower than the 12, 14, 16 and 18 Ironwolf Pro NAS drives. So, for the same price of a 10TB Ironwolf Pro you can get a 16TB Exos. Seems like an easy choice, right? Unfortunately, since these drives are for enterprise applications, they are not quiet at all. The W/R arm motor really makes a loud thump at the end of a movement. I haven't heard a drive this loud since the 1990's. I returned them for a set of Ironwolf Pro drives which are much quieter -not silent, but I can live with them in my home office. So, if you have your NAS in a separate room, these are great drives at an incredible price. But if you are like me and have them in the same room as your office, they are too loud.

Malcolm's review of Seagate Exos X18 ST16000NM000J - Hard drive - 16 TB - internal - SATA 6Gb/s - 7200 rpm - buffer: 256 MB

Pros: Excellent drive, 16TB to play with. Nowhere near as noisy as people make out, my 2 are silent. Occasional flickering noise but barely audible. Nice fast transfer speeds, much faster than any other drive I own. I don't normally buy Seagate, but at the price, it was a no brainer.Well happy, will buy more if the price drops again.Can't comment on reliability, these are only days old. Cons: None.

Massive drives

I bought two of these for a TrueNAS server setup. They have been deployed as ZFS mirrors and are working as expected. Frustrating that the warranty is missing 6 months, however a lot of retailers offer zero warranty on these drives and sell them for a similar price. As for noise, maybe I am more tolerant than others, but I find it difficult to hear them over the case fans during copy operations. I actually slept next to the NAS box while it was doing an overnight data transfer, didn't bother me at all. I am using a Fractal 7 XL which has some padding in the case and rubber hard drive mounts, so maybe that helps. .

Very Nice!

Purchased this to replace an 8T drive for the additional capacity. It is used only for backups in a drive dock and it is removed as soon as I copy the daily backups to it. I ran an error check on the drive which took ~ 16 hours due to the size but that is totally normal. The drive temperature was quite low at 35c during the test. The drive surface testing was perfect. Drives of this size, 7200 RPM and 256MB cache are expensive but it is worth it. This drive is much quieter than my current stack of drives. I was using an 8T, a 4T and a 2T for my weekly backups which is a lot of drive swapping.

Would buy again. Wish the 18 TB version was not priced so high right now. Size matters.

When it receives pieces of data, like from a file being written from a Wi-Fi source, it gives a grunt every few seconds. When writing a continuous file, the grunt is more-muffled, probably because it is a continuous grunt and you tend to ignore it. It is one on my noisiest drives but it's not a squeal or rattle, which would be very bad. All in all, better than most of my Western Digital drives. I would buy Seagate again but consider a remote location for this drive, if possible. I still like the 3 TB Seagates if you have enough slots for these small drives. They are inexpensive, quiet, and fast. The 4 TB and 6 TB Seagates run hot and the 8 TB Seagate is slow. The 12 TB IronWolf series is very nice and is another sweet spot in the Seagate lineup.