WD GOLD hard drives with 18 Terabyte Storage Volume start listing for 649 bucks
The race to 'as much storage volume as possible' on that mechanical HDD is just brutal, announced a while ago but now starting to list are 18 Terabyte HDDs from WD, the gold series in specific.
The 3.5-inch model WD181KRYZ is a unit to be found in the enterprise series WD Gold and seems to be priced in a 649 euros region. The spot of this HDD is interesting as WD does not even have a product page online just yet, but yeah it's already listed at etailers. In addition to the 18TB model, a 16TB model was released as well. The 18 TB version is listed as: 18TB GOLD 512 MB 3.5IN SATA 6GB/S 7200RPM
Before hitting that buy button, you might want to wait and see when the WD product page goes online, it is uncertain if the HDD will be CMR or SMR based.
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Senior Member
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That sounds tough. Maybe you should have used a traditional UPS with lead batteries. In any case if your area has plenty of power problems, a UPS ought to be mandatory for essential computer hardware. I don't have one because I could call the power delivery rock solid here where I live.
Senior Member
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Joined: 2015-06-27
For storage density, sure...
Also for corporations with deep pockets, sure...
But the price/capacity ratio is quite bad
- 8 TB drives can be found under $140, so 32+ TB for the price of a single 18 TB
- 14 TB drives can be found under $300, so 28 TB for less than this 18 TB
But new tech is cool, indeed !
Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less

and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.
Senior Member
Posts: 1696
Joined: 2008-07-16
Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less

and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.
Someone who lives in Europe ;-)
It's nice that there in the Desert you get such low prices, but here where the plains are green and the mountains are white, we have higher prices, unfortunately.
(Still, nowhere near as high as this ridiculously expensive 18 TB)
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Joined: 2020-06-23
Who pays 140$ for 8Tb? Thats how much I pay for 12Tb, usually even tad less

and 300$ for 14TB? Under 200$ max.
But paying more for something means it's better... oh wait... LOL!
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Well it can happen - because if it didn't, there wouldn't be so many data recovery houses for sure.
A lot of time when/if you keep servers so long that drives die of old age, the strenuous work-out from rebuilding the array can cause a borderline drive to have issues or otherwise start throwing errors and drop-out of the array. If one drops out of an array during a rebuild, you might not be able to rebuild the drive array and have all your data yet (it depends on the drive location, and the RAID level used).
So this in a nutshell is why places like back blaze and other similar server / drive array farms replace drives in a timely manner, and when it looks like they've got a bad pool of drives or a batch of drives that's getting up-there in hours, they replace them in the near term.
A lot of times when you have people losing arrays due to dual-drive (or more) failure and you hear about it on here, it's either due to a surge taking out multiple drive's logic boards at once, or it's just an old array that most folks with a higher operating budget (e.g. a business's budget vs an individual) would have sought to replace sooner.
There is something to be said for hard drives, though. I had a nice Raid 10 array on SSD's and every time the power went out there was about a 33% chance I'd lose a drive in the array. They were supposedly fail-safe designs, with capacitors and such. The drives would just boot up not part of the array, and I'd be forced into a text box and the card firmware trying to fix it.
Got sick of it threw the LSI card in a box, went back to using piles of random HDD's for backups that i disconnect when not in use, and was done with it. I don't have time to play admin when I could be bringing in income in making content.
Could have had a battery backup unit to avoid this issue altogether, but I already had one explode at my feet, and i had to run out of the house with a burning/smoldering/smoking lithium-ion-powered-bomb of a backup unit in my hands to save the house.