The latest flagship model to join Seagate’s range of IronWolf Pro hard drives, designed to support commercial and enterprise NAS devices ranging from single bay designs up to 24-bay units, is the humongous 18TB model. If you are happy to shell out over £500 for one of these, what sort of performance can you expect?

As with most hard drives, these days the 18TB IronWolf Pro (ST18000NE000) uses Helium technology which allows for 9 x 2TB platters together with 18 heads to be crammed into a 3.5in format drive with a height of just 26.11mm. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm with a 256MB cache which gives the drive an official transfer rate of 260MB/s while the average latency is quoted at 4.16ms.

Seagate quote power ratings for the 18TB IronWolf Pro as 1.25W standby, 1W sleep, 5.2W average idle and 8W average active.

The official workload rating of the drive is 300TB/year with an MTBF of 1.2M hours and Seagate back the drive with a 5-year warranty.

Physical Specifications:

• Usable Capacities: 18TB.
• Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm.
• No. Of Heads: 18.
• No. Of Platters: 9 (x 2TB).
• Cache: 256MB.
• Recording Method: Perpendicular / Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR).
• Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III).
• Form Factor: 3.5in.
• Dimensions: 26.11 x 101.85 x 146.99mm.
• Drive Weight: 679g.

Firmware Version: EN01.

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