Seagate Exos X24 24TB Enterprise Internal Hard Drive HDD - 6GB/s SATA 7200RPM 2.5M MTBF (ST24000NM002H)

I purchased one of these some time ago, and just now purchased another to install in a MSI 12TD-620US desktop. It works great.I see a lot of people have complained about the noise with this drive. The MSI desktop is whisper quiet. I don't think I have had a system this quiet before, so I was concerned about putting in a drive that was reported to be noisy. The previous drive I purchased is not noisy, and I am delighted to report that this one is also not noisy.One heads up - The Exos drive had great power management because it is essentially intended for servers. By default it parks the heads after 2 minutes idle, slows the rpm after 10 min idle, and spins down after 15 minutes idle. Saving power in a server farm is important.Windows 11 loves to ping the hard drives every 2 or 3 minutes, even if there is no pagefile on the disk. With Windows constantly waking up the drive this defeats the power management and gets annoying with constant windows notifications that it has woken up a device. I recommend tweaking the EXOS power management using the SeaChest_PowerControl to change or disable the advanced EXOS power management. This is a bit complex for novices, but search for "Exos power management Windows 11 SeaChest_PowerControl" and you will find articles explaining what needs to be done. I have not had to do this with my other Exos drive on Windows 10.

This drive is downright amazing! Huge 18 TERAbyte capacity? Check. Enterprise level performance, reliability, and durability? Check. Top of the line HDD read/write performance? Check.This drive is big, fast, and reliable. It’s built to run 24/7 with lots of reads and writes so it’s great for applications like NAS storage, media servers, and security cameras. It’s probably overkill for less demanding applications like desktop or backup use, but works great no matter how you use it.The only con is the price. I got it for significantly less than what it’s selling for (I think they initially listed the price incorrectly) but $440 is a lot for a HDD. That said, the price per GB is very reasonable when you consider it’s an enterprise level drive and you get so much capacity in a single drive.My dream is to get 3 more of these and run them in RAID 10 in a quality NAS. The one downside of spending thousands of dollars over the years to amass an 18TB video library is it’s difficult and expensive to backup and if I were to lose that library, it would take me months or even years to recreate it.

Running for over a year with some pretty heavy use for a media server. No problems at all, installation was a breeze. It can get a little bit noisy when doing big transfers, but as long as it keeps working, I don't mind the noise.

Purchased in November 2023 this Seagate EXOS 16TB drive failed after light use as an external backup drive connected via USB 3.2 cable to my lightly used Dell XPS 8960 computer where for maybe four hours a day I do emails and spend time online and process and post my own photographs. In other words I am a home user not generating much data. The drive did a few full backups and then incremental daily backups since late November. For redundancy I used a second 16 TB drive on alternative weeks, a Toshiba X300, that is still working fine. So my Seagate EXOS only worked for three months actual work, doing about 10 minutes backup per day.Last week I was most unhappy when the Seagate stopped doing backups. Windows Computer Management > Disk Storage reported "fatal device hardware error" and could not access the drive... could not read the drive or write to the drive.Last Thursday six days ago I went to the Seagate website warranty page requesting a replacement and today, Wednesday, I received a replacement on my front steps. Very nice, very efficient.However, one huge problem. Seagate is requiring me to return the bad drive without removing confidential data.I just now had an online chat with a very polite support person telling them the drive contains a lot of confidential data and I want to make sure the data cannot be read. I explained it is impossible to use software to erase data on a drive that cannot be read and that I want to drill a hole through the disk to prevent anyone from accessing it. While I cannot access the drive on my computer, a technically skilled person might be able to access it using more advanced techniques or just fixing the hardware error. The person responded saying that drilling the hole will void my warranty. They added that Seagate's procedures and protocols will absolutely prevent anyone from seeing my data. I responded saying I know Seagate to be an honorable and reputable company, but that I know perfectly well procedures and protocols are not always followed.So... I am not at all satisfied with Seagate's warranty procedures. Customers should be allowed to obtain warranty replacement on a failed drive that the customer disables to prevent any access to confidential data. They send the bad drive in purely to provide proof of drive failure.

24 hours after install and still formatting. No bad sectors yet, so assuming it will be done in The morning.