Lowest ever price for the WD 18TB Elements. There are better prices if you are after lowest $/TB (https://diskprices.com/?locale=au is pretty good for checking).
No idea what is in these - I'm sure people will advise in the comments. Happy shucking!
CamelCamelCamel.
at least the elements seem to be easier to pull apart/put back together than the seagates
keep at least one enclosure for warranty?
This is true. I shucked a 16TB recently, (after doing several days long tests pre-shuck). It's pretty easy to reassemble without damaging the case. I have no concerns about the warranty.
If you ever need to make a claim, simply state you had the drive professionally examined for data recovery purposes to rule out the USB controller being faulty.
If they really want to void your warranty I think power up time in SMART would be more straightforward.
Pretty sure having it connected to power and USB will also increase the power up time counter
And when they asked where and to see the invoice of said "professionally examined for data recovery purposes"?
It could be pro bono, you don't have to prove payment to WD - only provide an explanation as to why the drive is in a different condition from the original packaging. This is a) an easy explanation to make, b) a valid explanation, and c) one that any drive manufacturer will believe. I promise they'll have no quibbles with warranty claims with this statement.
Besides, if you're an IT professional you aren't going to invoice yourself for works performed…
@Switchblade88: Hmmm, interesting….ok, guess I'll give that excuse a try (Whenever I would return an external hard drive) whenever they ask why the box is damaged at the seams……and or doesn't come back to together because you broke the tabs that are meant to click together to hold the sides together when you tried to take it apart and holding the case together with sticky tape or glue….
What's the read/write speeds?
For these capacities it can make a real difference between 100mb/s and 250mb/s… I don't think I could suffer slow drives anymore especially with SSD prices now under $100/Tb :/
With that logic $1,800 for 18tb in SSD?
This seams like a much better deal for the capacity. You're not going to be installing games or anything on this…
Running games for this? No.
Caching games after playing? Plex storage? 'Linux' ISO backups? Yep.
The slow write speeds are the single greatest bottleneck in my system. I really need a pair of SSDs as a cache for my Storage Space…
How can storage be your bottleneck when write speeds are faster than NBN download speeds?
@4agte: Because I have multiple drives and SSDs in my system?
Because I copy files back and forth repeatedly?
I wish I had faster NBN, absolutely, but that's a separate bottleneck I can't make go any faster
@Switchblade88: I can understand transferring games back and forth to ssd but not constantly. Surely media can remain on mechanicals once moved. I use my unraid server for similar purposes. Each to their own but I find a 2tb cache and using a mover script to move ssd downloads to mechanicals works for my needs
I use storage spaces and even with 2 NVME SSD as cache it is still slow on write speeds.
@AwesomeAndrew: Aw, really?
I'd be interested to try something else like ZFS but having no experience I don't know the in's and out's of each as to what'd work best.
At this point I'm also considering an external SAN with SFP network access for throughput. But even used enterprise gear puts this basic setup at a grand or two before any data is written. And I have no idea of the best place for advice with acquiring gear or compatibility etc
What SSD's are under $100/Tb?
The T5 was $200 for 2TB last week
thanks!
I had to restore 1.8TB off of an earlier (lower capacity) model of this last week, and it took two days. I have no idea if they're running the same drives internally, but it was not fast. In its defense though, it was mainly small individual files, rather than large sequential reads.. but I suspect that's what most peoples backups are going to look like.
Check that you weren't on a USB2 connection.
Off the 14TB I get over 200MB/s sustained reads.
I transferred 5 TB in about 7 hours.
It's hard to provide an accurate answer to this question but WD specifies read speed at 269Mbyte/sec for the 18T (and approx 250 for the 16T).
Write speeds of course will vary significantly based on what you're writing but I'd expect sustained throughput would be around 100Mbyte/sec or thereabouts for 'average' cases on this drive.
To compare this - the $49 500G SSD from Officeworks (USB3) gives me approx 100Mbyte/sec writes and 400Mbyte/sec reads in my testing.
Nice ordered one
If your order hasn't shipped is it showing the new lower price of $435? If not, are you still able to cancel and re-order?
Good deal. Personally I would prefer to buy from Amazon US as their returns are easier. Amazon UK you need to send it yourself and then cla the postage back later.
Anyone have an idea what drive might be inside?
A Western Digital hard disc drive.
Not necessarily!
It might be a HGST drive (yes yes, they're technically the same company)
I'm also wondering what drives these have. Perhaps given the popularity of the previous time this was posted, would anyone who got one be able to report the drive model?
As a bonus, would also be interested in their actual RPM, vs SMART reported RPM, if you're up for some acoustic spectral analysis.
As far as I know, WD 18TB (and 20TB) HDDs to date have been conventional magnetic recording (CMR) drives with energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR).
Some people seem to have found WD Ultrastar DC HC550 drives inside.
https://documents.westerndigital.com/content/dam/doc-library…
I wonder how realiable these 18TB drives are? All your eggs in 1 basket??
How much Pron do we need? ;)
If you are backing up correctly then it shouldn't be a case of all eggs in one basket. If you have 18TB of important data you should have at least 36TB of drive space. Having 2x 18TB drives beats having 6x 6TB. Also good for those that need a large parity drive for redundancy and backup purposes. Or those that don't have important data to need backups or parity. Biggest concern I have is drives run quite warm (still within operational tolerances) in these enclosures.
Anything truly irreplaceable needs to be on a 3rd off site drive as well. (Backed up regularly but not as frequently as you're main backup). You never know when fire, flood, theft or something less likely (e.g. infestation) could ruin your day.
Yup! idrive or backblaze. As far as I'm concerned, these large drives are for local mass storage and I don't trust them absolutely. Md5 sum the files and do regular scrubbing or use zfs with checksums.
@Felixrising: And oh what fun when the OS or some errant piece of software changes a file (usually metadata) and it's not corrupt but then you have to decide which to keep. I use to do manual MD5Sums but it got to be too time consuming. Now it's only truely irreplaceable stuff I bother with that level of effort. I wouldn't at all but I was once very lucky to recover everything after being hit by an early cryptovirus - I noticed the activity and stopped it before it touched anything I hadn't backed up (a few weeks worth of photos). Still a mess to clean up.
I don't do Backblaze though. I do backups at work or at a relative's house. It's less frequent than I'd like but I don't trust 3rd parties not to lose my data - yes even Backblaze.
I don't do Backblaze though. I do backups at work or at a relative's house. It's less frequent than I'd like but I don't trust 3rd parties not to lose my data - yes even Backblaze.
I think the key thing is that cloud backups should only be one layer in your overall backup strategy and they shouldn't be your only backup. Ideally you would keep infrequent data as cold storage (ie. offline) stored offsite, then keep another onsite and then also have your encrypted cloud backup.
I'd expect some form of parity/mirror on any hdd array, even for disposable data (eg Linux ISOs).
Will this be a big enough capacity to hold my Cyberpunk 2077 save game files?
If you buy three, and only keep 1 save game, then yes.
gotta raid0 that stuff
the zero stands for how many bits you'll get back if a drive dies
I feel that recent announcements of the HAMR 80TB drives hopefully gives us a roadmap to falling prices across the board… and whilst I still have 15TB free on my NAS, I think I'll hold off adding another drive to the 3x12TB array for now!
Damn I missed the Seagate 10TB for $249 deal in amazon. This looks like a bit too expensive compared to that deal.
If the deal price is $24/TB you're effectively paying $90 more for the higher capacity of this drive.
Which can actually be a reasonable tradeoff when considering available ports. If you've not got an enterprise disk array (yet!) then if can be worth it to pack more capacity per SATA port.
Yeah, if you just want to hang one drive off your modem to store your entertainment on, a single massive drive can be just the ticket.
Price has now dropped to $24, had to buy one
Looking at the other link in OP I came across a WD Black 5TB for $180. - https://www.amazon.com.au/WD_Black-Drive-External-Compatible…
Anyone know if this would work for a CCTV NVR? or would the constant write kill it?
I'm after a USB 2.5 external so it can be powered over USB (already filled my internal bays)
Can anyone who has ordered confirm whether their price has automatically decreased to the new price of $434.35? Or will earlier orders need to be cancelled and re-ordered (if possible)?
I've ordered 2 for $867.70 less 3% using Amazon gift cards brings it to $842.64.
$23.41/TB - happy camper.
Where'd you buy the gift cards?
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/wiki/discounted_egift_cards?&#c…
I buy mine from AAMI Rewards (Suncorp Benefits)
pretty cheap..nice.
But hard to commit to 18TB without warranty (shucked) :P