Exos 7E8 6TB Internal Hard Drive Enterprise HDD – CMR 3.5 Inch 512E SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 128MB Cache for Enterprise, Data Center – Frustration Free Packaging (ST6000NM021A)

Seagate 16TB HDD Exos X16 7200 RPM 512e/4Kn ~300 USD (2021) This has been a 100% working drive so far. It has been writing its new contents for 3 days straight now. Temperature remaining at 32 degrees C. This is Great considering I am running it at full demand for a long time. For comparison my external WDC WD100EMAZ-00WJTA0 10000.8 GB (WD My Book 10GB) has run at 48 to 53 degrees C, alarmingly hot. After this WD external is getting shucked, the enclosure dremeled open for air, or a fan physical screwed on from an old computer. Datacenter drives can be noisy and this is generally known, this drive has been whisper quiet. There are not any clicking or ticking or whizzing sounds. Mine came with SN03 firmware and SN04 was available. Updating the firmware was a pain in the ass. Nothing can be done while in windows because it blocks everything like it is a virus, thanks Microsoft. I had to boot into seagate tools and then type the one commandline. This was easy, except that it took 4 hours of searching and reading everything available online to figure out that one line!!!!!! Horrible documentaion on this, not even youtube could help. While in Seagate tools I changed my drive to 4K (4096) or 4KN logical sectors. If you do this, do it before putting data on it. The majority will not know or care about this and is not a reason to disregard buying this drive. I am traditionally a Western Digital fan. 20 some years ago I used Seagate in everything with fantastic results (I still have a couple still around shelfed as backup storage). This drive was on sale for 300 when it is normally 400. I needed a drive quickly and at a good price. NOTHING compared to it in terms of price to value ratio. This might be in part due to COVID. I have been surprised at the quality so far and may be returning to using more Seagate hard drives again. My drive is not a SED (self encrypting model) but I am running Veracrypt on it fine.

Shipped direct from Seagate to me, purchased through Amazon. Shipping protection seemed decent - came from FedEx. Drive spun up smoothly with no noise or issues. Raid mirror built up in ~24 hrs and far so good on the Exo 16x series 14TB. Cheaper than the Iron wolf consumer grade variety. Went with these vs Iron Wolf/Iron Wolf Pro due to the 5yr warranty and enterprise quality and MTBF (mean time between failure). Currently running as RAID mirror, but eventually will pick up a 3rd for raid 5 array in a Synology (yet to be purchased). Drives are a bit noisier than my prior WD Blacks and Toshiba consumer grade drives for reference. No issues with the 4k/512e sector size in Win 10 or Linux 20.04. I run dual boot and both seem to recognize the drive behind the AMD Raid controller I'm using just fine. Registered for long term warranty (serial numbers printed on the boxes) and set to run these the next 5+ years. Fingers crossed it's toward the 5-10 year side. :)

It seems a lot of these reviews get mashed together, so to be clear, this is for the SATA III (6gb/s) 16TB Seagate Exos. These run very cool (I've not seen them hit higher than 32c under heavy load, but usually stay below 30 in my system) They're not the quietest drives but they're also not obnoxiously loud and are typically only notably audible during spin-up and heavy access. I've bought a couple of these and plan to buy at least a few more once the price comes down again. If you're looking at these drives wondering what the differences are between the Exos series and the IronWolf Pro series, here's some quick food for thought: The IronWolf Pro series has typically has the same interface, cache sizes, and very comparable read/write speeds. (I've personally found the IronWolf Pro's to be a hair faster than comparable Exos drives, though the differences were very minimal.) Workload: The drives in the Exos line are rated to handle up to 550TB of reading and writing per year, while the IronWolf Pro series is only rated for 300TB per year. Data Recovery: Seagate includes data recovery services for a certain period in the warranty for IronWolf Pro series drives. This is not included by default with Exos drives and is one of the reasons the IronWolf Pro series drives may sometimes be more expensive than comparable Exos drives. Longevity: Exos Drives are rated at approximately double the MTBF(Mean Time Before Failure) as IronWolf Pro drives(~1.2 million hours vs ~2.5 million hours) Multi-Bay support: IronWolf Pro drives are rated to handle up to 24 drives in a single enclosure/raid array) while Exos Drives do not have this limitation. Write Cache technology: Some of the lower capacity IronWolf Pro series use (or at least have used in the past) have used Write-Back caching. While the Exos line pretty much always uses write-through caching. SMR vs CMR: Some of the lower capacity IronWolf Pro series use/have used SMR (shingled magnetic recording), a technology that has previously come under scrutiny for not being advertised. SMR drives are optimized for write-once read-many applications, meaning while read speeds are just fine- write speeds are typically slower on SMR drives due to the way data is written to the platters. Exos drives are always CMR and have both good write AND read speeds. If you're looking at an IronWolf drive and not sure if it's CMR or SMR be sure to check Seagate's website.

It's fast, it's a bit noisy, it's an enterprise drive. I have 4 of these in my NAS, installed over a period of 5 years. Not a one of them has had a bit of trouble. They are plug-n-play, fast, and for my model NAS, on the supported drive list by the manufacturer for no-worries installation. Just make sure you get a new and not a refurbished model, as the new ones have a very good warranty from Seagate.

UPDATE #3: I put this drive in my Unifi Dream Machine Pro and after 3 minutes of "initializing drive", UDM alerted me that the drive has failed and that I need to replace it. I thought maybe it was a fluke before with my issues. Sad that Seagate refuses to honor a seemingly good warranty for a clearly defective drive. UPDATE #2: Replacement drive is still no longer recognized in UEFI. Seagate responded to my RMA for replacement of the second DOA drive with a cancellation of the RMA and explanation that the drive was fine. In feeling that I'm not going to get anywhere with Seagate support, I've written this whole thing off as 'money lost' and ended up buying a 16TB competitor HDD and that drive has had no issues thus far in my primary desktop computer. I haven't bought a Seagate in 14 years (the last drive was a 120GB and it just pooped-out - I used it as a cold-storage HDD for the last few years of its life). Also, I've had to send for a couple replacements before with the competitor and never had an issue. I'm sticking with the competitor. UPDATE #1: Requested a replacement with Seagate support. A few days after registering for drive replacement, I received a template apology email apologizing for not shipping my replacement in time. I just received my replacement and that drive is DOA. Unlike the issue with drive attempt #1, this drive sounds like I'm hooked up to a machine in a hospital; 3 seconds of silence then 1 second light beep sound. The drive hardware initially went in-and-out of Windows OS hardware detection for a minute at boot and then stopped completely. Computer Management -> Disk Management provides a prompt that the drive must be initialized but then results in an error saying that cannot initialize a drive that doesn't exist. After I powered-down my computer and spun back up, the drive no longer powers-on. After 3rd computer restart, drive no longer recognized in UEFI. Initial Review: Ordered the 16TB Exos from SabrePC and I was able to register it for the 5 year warranty without issue. However, after installation the drive loudly played beautiful, high-pitched tunes before its soul left its chassis. Needless-to-say, I have submitted a RMA with Seagate for replacement.

Pro: fast, value and storage Con: cooling, repetitive noise This is a 16TB drive, consuming more power than 8TB drive is expected, but didn't realize that cooling fan next to it is required. Its still fine since I have ultra quiet cooling fan, what is not fine is that the drive is noisy in that it "chok-chok-chok-chok" several times a minute, that annoys me when sitting about 4 ft from it in my quiet TV room. Other than the cons, which may not be an issue for other people, it is a good performing drive, fast and high capacity. Its been running for a week, time will tell it this is truly a good drive.

I've decided to build my first NAS instead of getting the prebuilt ones like Synology and Qnap. Needed some high capacity drives and I found that the 14TB Exos here on amazon were the best price per terabyte. The seller name is HyperHawk and from the time of buying these the price per terabyte is around 15 dollars. I bought two of these drives and it arrived pretty quick and in the regular drive package, decent enough to protect it from travel. First thing I did was checked the warranty and it call came back with 5 years. So, everything started well. These were mounted in my Unraid box and checked with preclear twice before placing any data in it. No issues at all when ran through preclear. Have only been running for a few weeks but it's doing well so far. I was afraid the drives were gonna be loud based on the reviews here, but the sound was only noticable during start up and minimal while writing to the disk. Could be because my case have some rubber mounts for the drives, I'm using the Fractal Node 804 case. I'd recommend these drives if you're looking for good value hard drives for your NAS.

So I don’t write too many reviews, but I wanted to put this together for people who are as confused as I was about whether or not these drives are loud. Before I settled on these, I read tons of reviews on Newegg and Amazon and it seemed like a pretty even split between people who think these drives are horrendously loud, and people who think they are silent as the grave. The short answer seems to be, they are both. The key is how they’re being used. In my experience, these drives are silent until a couple of seconds into a large data transfer. After that, they start to make some noise, and it is significant. I wouldn’t want to listen to it for a long time. However, in my use case, (a personal home media server that only I use) I never reach the maximum speed of the drives (around 250mb per second) unless I am transferring whole shows onto the drive, or exporting them to an external device, and in that case, the transfers do not last long. Also, I am not seated next to the computer when tranferring large files so the sound is quieter from a short distance. My advice when purchasing these drives is to think about your use case. Mainly, how often will you need to move files that are bigger than just a couple gigabytes? Because that is when the louder, more concerning noises will occur. Also, consider setting up your pc so that the drives never disengage or “spin down” once the pc is on. There is a delay of several seconds before you can access files and a lot of noise when the drives first spin up before they settle into silent operation. (Personally, I like the sound they make when they spin up, but I wouldn’t want them doing that all the time. It’s bad for them. ((I know that is contested, but I’m saying it anyway, since I think the people on the other side of that argument are wrong.))