WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

Product Information

Both the Western Digital G-Drive 18TB and LaCie d2 Professional 18TB are perfect for storing massive quantities of data whilst offering very fast data access. They both feature 7200 RPM drives for fast data transfers. The LaCie includes a Thunderbolt 3 interface where the Western Digital only USB 3.0. You need to move up to the Western Digital G-Drive Pro 18TB to get the faster Thunderbolt 3 interface. They feature aluminium cases for improved heat distribution. Hard drives can get quite hot under continuous load, therefore having adequate ventilation will help extend the longevity of the drive. Even though using only a 5400 RPM drive the USB 3 seemed fast enough for all but the most demanding tasks. Enhanced reliability with 3D Active Balance Plus technology and error recovery controls with NASware 3.0 technology For power efficiency, the drive is designed to go to sleep after about ten minutes of inactivity. For most home users, this is a perfect setting, but it can be customized or disabled using the WD Drive Utilities software. I've had mine set to not go to sleep since day one, and it has no problem with this.

I had a Gold which I was/am very happy with, so this review compares the two. The drives are currently in the same machine, so I can compare real world performance. If you can afford it though, get one of our best PS5 SSDs . Just bear in mind that the maximum capacity is 4TB, not 18 and that it will cost you more, much more. High capacityThese drives have been in use for a few months with no issues. No complaints about the performance.

If this product is unavailable in your region, you may need to use a specialist parcel forwarding service to take advantage of the deal. Even though these are officially not on the approved hardware for the Synology DS918+ and DX517 expansion cabinet, they seem to work and seem to work well.

If you want to buy a hard drive for a specialist business PC or the best gaming SSD for your PC or console, there are some additional considerations. Collin is the B2B Hardware Editor for TechRadar Pro. He has been in journalism for years, with experience in small and large markets, including Gearadical, DailyBeast, FutureNet, and more.

is certainly a massive amount of data. Whilst some will easily be able to consume it all, many will never be able to need such large data storage. Therefore I recommend you look at your specific needs before choosing a hard drive capacity. Simply choosing the largest capacity drive you can find may not make the most sense. Having multiple copies of data for additional redundancy, it may be safer to have 2 (or more) smaller drives with the same copy of data, therefore reducing the event of data loss if a drive were to fail.

Supports up to 300TB/yr workload rate(2) | (2) Workload Rate is defined as the amount of user data transferred to or from the hard drive. Workload Rate is annualized (TB transferred ✕ (8760 / recorded power-on hours)). Workload Rate will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations. This is my first time on these particular drives, the Red PRO, it uses CMR technology which is supposed to be a step up from the old SMR technology, faster speeds and reliability, also these have a 5 year, (limited) warranty...the Pro is a little bit more expensive than the basic Red version, but hopefully the little bit more spent equates to a better drive overall with a longer lifespan... The drive is made up of nine 2TB platters (with 18 heads) offering the highest areal density across the industry, 256MB cache and has a spindle speed of up to 7200RPM. There’s a dual-attached motor and RV sensors to guarantee steady performance, which means 1.2 million hours MTBF. When it comes to performance, the IronWolf Pro 18TB is rated for an up to 260MB/s sustained transfer rate as well as an average latency of 4.16ms. As for power consumption, the drive is rated for up to 8W average operating power as well as 5.2W idle power. The features Ontdek bedrijfsoplossingen voor gegevensopslag die gemaakt zijn voor betrouwbaarheid, betaalbaarheid en gebruiksgemak.

The drive comes with a five-year warranty with a three-year subscription to Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Plan. Once registered, you will be able to benefit from what Seagate calls “a global team of world-class data recovery experts in case of unexpected data loss” with a claimed successful data recovery rate of 90%. Note that the service is not available in all countries. The larger the drive, the higher the data transfer rate in general; Seagate quotes a 7.8% increase going from 12TB to 18TB, small but not-so-negligible. The numbers we recorded in our benchmark are unambiguous; this is a very, very fast hard disk drive when used as external storage. Note : While this is a WD drive, this is not affected by the wiping bug that's affecting some WD and SanDisk external SSDs. Since your computers work on the binary system, there is an increment of 2 to the 10th power or 1,024 in each storage level. Therefore, in the computer system:Now you might be wondering why the advertised HDD storage does not match the usable data capacity. Most hard drive or SSD users have the same question- why actual drive capacity is lower than the space mentioned on the label? But before you blame the drive manufacturer for giving false information, it’s important to know the reason behind this capacity discrepancy. So, let’s find out how the capacity of hard disk drives is calculated and why their actual size differs from the advertised size. I've been using Toshiba drives recently in my NAS drive, I was impressed with them, but now at only around 3 years of low use i'm starting to see errors in the SMART reporting system. By the spec sheet, the only difference between the Red Pro and Gold is the MTBF. In my machine side by side, I've found that to be very untrue. The Gold is quieter and noticeably faster. They're all on the same SATA III controller. Gold gets 50 MB/s faster transfer when past the write cash. That's 20% which is a pretty big difference for a drive that's claimed by the manufacturer to be "the same" spec. for write. It's easy to assume that SSDs and hard drives are simple products when compared to laptops, TVs, or PCs, but there's still plenty to consider if you want to buy new storage. One feature that I like about the WD My Book Desktop external hard drives is that they have built-in support for 256-bit AES hardware encryption, which means that you can encrypt your data without relying on some third-party software -- it's all handled on the drive.