Seagate EXOS MACH.2 2x18 HDD - Should You Buy?

[@davidpedrolcarol1240]

No seagals today?

[@christopherjackson2157]

Power consumption and longevity/reliabiility are the two things I'm watching for on this one :) And I guess for benchmarks I would want to see it compared against 2 separate sata hard drives in an array

[@rahulshah1408]

This may help. In seagate’s faq they suggest partitioning the sata disk into 2 and then use soft raid 0 to get performance. Or if your load is big enough, it’ll naturally help. They even have a fio script. I don’t see the partitioning working except for testing unless you use something like lvm. From seagate manual. It’s split by lba not lun and reads the consecutive sector log. Exos 2X18 is a device that contains two actuators which can read and write concurrently. The first 50% of the device's LBA space is mapped to the primary actuator and the second 50% of the LBA space is mapped to the secondary actuator. Exos 2X18 supports the Concurrent Positioning Ranges log page 47h which indicates the sets of contiguous LBAs within each actuator for which positioning is possible at the same time. See ACS-5, Rev. 6 or beyond for details.

[@udirt]

any hint how to find the fio script? I wanna see if they did anything special.

[@micksmithson6724]

@03:33 "This manages to do it in optical fashion" Is it not magnetic drive media or am i missing something?

[@BS25999]

That is soooooo expensive. Very few real people will be buying these new. Perhaps used in a couple of years but today.... not a chance.

[@scampilover00]

Bought two 🤭

[@vladstark2091]

Bought 3, just to use with external dock for retro games storage😅😂

[@kwinzman]

4 months later: any benchmark updates?

[@Jeff-rg9io]

Populating my new qnap nas with 8 - 20TB exos drives. Best value for me as I am not only looking for performance but also for space.

[@AinzOoalG0wn]

how long does raid builds take for that o-O; and do u also get a backup to match that capacity?

[@PlanetLinuxChannel]

I’m sure these cost a pretty penny for the next while, but holy crap these are the future! Near SATA SSD levels of performance with crazy hard drive capacity and quieter than a lot of other large drives, these look amazing! Even if the benchmarks come back lower than advertised, and it’s only 350-450 MB/s or so, that’s still crazy performance for a mechanical drive that will definitely be noticeable and closer to an SSD than most other HDDs.

[@esotericjahanism5251]

What's very exciting is the capacity, if these things are hitting the market at 14TB MINIMUM imagine how large the capacities will get in the next 5 years or 10 years.

[@JAXNRmusic]

I have to sadly tell you that I bought 3 of these disks an all of them are giving me half the speed... 220-280mb/s I wanna know if there's something else I can do to "unlock" the full speed?? I just conected each one of them directly to my MB on a SATA3 port... what am i doing wrong lol

[@bekone]

​@@JAXNRmusicI believe you need a special driver because right now you are almost certainly using only one head.

[@leonpano]

No review video out until now?

[@nothsa2k]

Aw, damn, I saw "2x18TB" in the title and thought Seagate had somehow managed to fit 36TB in a single drive

[@michaelcarson8375]

No that's what they've been calling their mach.2 drives 2xXX the first gen drives use 2x14. I like it because it's shorter than mach.2

[@kevinlsims7330]

@@michaelcarson8375 What About Their X16 And X20 Drive Names?

[@michaelcarson8375]

@@kevinlsims7330 Those are just normal drives with higher capacity, but no mach.2 version.

[@GregDrinkwater]

An obvious question here... Does Synology or qnap have the ability to see/use the two LUNs at full performance?

[@zagan1]

They would add support very fast as they do business and enterprise NAS gear

[@UrielVentris1984]

i am really looking forward to these drives man i love your videos hdds are definetly still innovating do you think they will ever release these to the regular public? if so i would use my old exos drives for backup and exos mach2 for more active data.

[@Keiuran]

I don't care about the speeds, I picked up two refurbished models for some RAID 1 data drives for my PC purely for the noise reduction. These things are so much more quiet than any drive you can find at comparable sizes and speeds.

[@DCMAKER133]

You are really off unless you are talking about the average speed over time when doing a complete read/write of the entire HDD. HDD speeds keep going up the larger the drive is due to density of data on each ring/spin. My 6TB 7200rpm HDDs had a peak speed of ~270MBps and IIRC an inner speed of 90MBps (might have been 60MBps). My 12TB 7200RPM HDDs had ~320MBps IIRC. The inner speed I don't recall. If the 6TB has a 60Mbps then I think the 12TB has 90MBps but its been so many years since I benchmarked them. I do know the outer speeds are correct.

[@Typhon888]

That’s amazing the noise level compared to the Iron Wolf. I have a IR pro 18tb and when it’s working it is loud but I like the sound of it .

[@alexsarbu3978]

Indeed. The Ironwolf drives... I do have a bunch of them, they're as annoying as seagulls and for the same reason (noise. I guess the HDDs won't steal your sandwich if you bring it outside). It's not an unpleasant noise though. But the new Exos is amazing.

[@Typhon888]

@@alexsarbu3978 Yeah if I had more than one I could see it being super annoying. I have mine filled almost and only read from it and the reads are much quieter vs writing.

[@BRBearUSA]

I agree that regular operational noise is actually nice... I find it soothing. Now, nothing is worse than an HDD that you KNOW is starting to go bad when it starts making "failure noises"... If you are experienced like me with HDDs, which I'me pretty sure you must be, since you are watching this video and posting here, we can definitely tell when a drive is failing just by listening to not normal noises. I just bought a 14TB IronWolf NAS Pro from NewEgg, and the first drive was DOA, and I could tell from its noise on the first 4 or 5 seconds while it was starting up right at the very first time that it was a bad drive... I sent it back to NewEgg, they replaced it with no questions asked, and I am very pleased to report that noises and reliability/performance of the replacement they sent are superb. ;-) 👍🏻🤙🏻🖖🏻✌🏻😃😎

[@alexsarbu3978]

@@BRBearUSA Superb noises are all good, unless we're talking about a Heavy Metal concert level of superb ;)

[@kevinlawson1746]

Look like WD is also doing this , can't wait .

[@chrisblack6258]

I'm excited for faster HDD, especially looking forward to faster random read speed.

[@jerrywatson1958]

I've seen enough, It's the one for me but 1 drive costs more than a 923+ at this time. I will still be on the look out for a few. Overtime I will get 4 or 5 depending on the Synology NAS I chose. Thanks once again. Looks like I'll be budgeting $2.5K for my ultimate NAS upgrade.

[@DBravo29er]

Standard EXOS is still really solid. I use 5 in my 1520+. Very pleased with them.

[@jerrywatson1958]

@@DBravo29er I am looking for quieter drives like this one with more storage. I need to raise MY Prices for the work I do to keep up with inflation to afford the new technology. But yeah I will pay the price for 5 yrs+ of satisfaction. I have had my DS216+ for at least that long.

[@UrielVentris1984]

@@DBravo29er i have 4 thier standard exos drives are excellent.

[@bigpoppa1234]

I have exos x18 in my nas, they were insanely loud at stock and made worrying head crunching noises, but update firmware and disable EPC power and they come down in noise, but they will still be audible in the same room when writing. I've moved the main usage off to an NVME volume so they are pretty quiet now.

[@basdfgwe]

Sell the 923+ and buy this and run unraid 🤣

[@i0ntempest]

I’m interested but I can’t even find a single place that sells these except sketchy eBay listings……

[@nascompares]

Unfortunately Seagate switched these to "direct to data center" a while ago, so when you see them online, there's a half decent chance they will have 1000s on burned hours on them...sorry man

[@pyromethious]

None of the links I tried to find them went to an actual product, so I'm guessing they're not "on shelves" yet.

[@CarlRyds]

Would love to see a video on what you think about shucking Hard Drives for saving on a NAS setup - Pros and cons, good and bad, all that stuff

[@kevinlsims7330]

I Buy Mine Refurbished At A Fraction of The price Of Shucking External drives! The Oldest 1 Is A EXOS 12TB I Have Had Running 24 X 7 For 3 Years Now!

[@michaelcarson8375]

Why don't you get a 1st gen Mach.2 drive? Since I haven't seen any number for the 2nd gen drives outside of the spec sheet I'm thinking the 2nd gen in only about ~100MB/s.. I still like the full deplex of SAS over SATA even if you limit the 12GB/s drives to 6Gb/s. SSDs still are not as reliable as HDDs YET. The Nvme connector on HDDs is just an attempt to unify the connector for the tri-mode controllers, which should make everything cheaper in the long run. Even though you couldn't get us the numbers I subbed to you anyways. Seagate won't stop you from pulling number from a 1st gen drive. It would be nice to know which HBA and RAID controllers from Microchip, Broadcom, and Areca actually work well with these seagate drives. Have considered a video on that yet?

[@li5668]

You have been researching these devices for years, both HDDs and NASs, why don't you put their data into a framework, such as performance, speed, noise, warranty, or where you recommend it? Make the comparisons on graphs and show the differences in value. The waving hand is a bit boring.

[@GreenGJ]

With all those requirements, make me wonder if these would ork in the Synology DS3623xs+.

[@nascompares]

They won't. I tried that specific unit + a QNAP TVS-h874..neither have the software setup to access the dual LUN architecture. Sorry man

[@jakesells2379]

Will these drives work as intended in a Synology 5 bay system?

[@BRBearUSA]

Fascinating....! Another awesome video from you, man. Now, the faces that you make when listening to both drives.., are priceless..!!! 🤣😂🤣 ROFL.

[@bobbymoss6160]

Just got my hands on some Exos 2x14 Mach.2. Boy, in terms of noise level, these Exos are leagues quieter than the WD UltraStars DC H550.

[@deacbeugene]

Strange thing about "dual LUN". So they just offer to maintain "raid 0" on these two LUNs outside of a drive or what? Or if you are unable to properly communicate with the drive, it will act like JBOD, so there really will be no advantage on speed?

[@zagan1]

The drive speed sounds great but I wonder what the sustained speed is.

[@michaelcarson8375]

You can find a video on youtube with gen 1 result and 2nd gen seems to add 100MB/s to the transfer rate, but I can't find anything beyond the seagate data sheet.

[@mdd1963]

I've no seen a single one for sale yet..

[@DCMAKER133]

What I don't understand is with an EXOS MACH.2 2x18TB hard drive are you forced to have 2 logical 9TB hard drives? Does that mean in Windows you are forced to do a RAID0/jumbo for 1 18TB drive or does the HDD hardware/firmware handle this internally allowing it to show up as a single 18TB hard drive to the OS (Windows in my case)? Or does the HDD hardware/firmware allow all of the above? I have not found any explanation online that completely answers this. I have just found partial explanations that do not fully answer this and leaves open questions. I would love to know and appreciate the help! I plan on using this when I have the time to fix/rebuild my SnapRAID server. It currently is SOL because I ran into hardware issues and haven't been able to fix it for a few years due to funds/health stuff. This year, I plan on building an entirely new server with using either Mach.2 as my parity drives or Mach.2 as data drives and SSDs as parity. Getting rid of the 1-2 day sync/scrub/rebuild times will be amazing! I think and wish the industry would completely drop the standard 3.5 inch hard drive size and go back to the 2 independent actuators from decades ago. Then, they could add this technology to the 2 independent actuators allowing us to have 4 actuators giving us possibly up to or more than 1GBps read speeds! Thus, we could actually max out 12Gbps SAS connector. Allowing us to actually completely read future 50TB hard drives in half of a day instead of 1-2+ days. At an average of 250MBps a 50TB hard drives would take just over 2 days to completely read! With Mach.2, it still will take over an entire day to completely read! If we went back to 2 independent actuators and added this technology we could reach 1GBps speeds and completely read future 50TB HDDs in about 12 hours! This would also double or quadruple the TB/year limit of hard drives* due to having 2 full read heads/actuators. I could easily see the industry being willing to accept a whole new hard drive form factor for the ability to have full SAS 12Gbps speeds and double or more the life span of HDDs. I myself would gladly buy a new 4U case to have that. Replacing my case would be a small price and would pay for itself for my HDDs to last twice as long or more and doubling or quadrupling their speed! *I don't fully understand this so please correct me if I am wrong. From my understanding, hard drives were originally considered to have drastically more read/write capacity than SSDs. For some reason, sometime over the last 5-10 years HDDs started to have a TB/year limit. From my research this limit is to the read head not the HDD discs. I would love to better understand this and what changed. Any clear and accurate explanation and comment on this specific part is welcomed as well.

[@Angel24112411]

Windows won't allow you to make RAID0 on a single physical drive. SATA version shows as a single drive, but then it doesn't show performance benefits. On linux it is possible to divide the SATA drive in 2 partitions and setup mdraid0 with these 2 partitions, where with BFQ sheduler it will show increased performance.

[@jesus.moreno]

If I get one of those for my regular PC windows 11 ... Do i need to install an additional software ?? ...

[@MrTimMifsud]

Would these work as dual LUN in a UniFi UNAS Pro?

[@nascompares]

Definitely, definitely, definitely, DEFINITELY not. Sorry man

[@MrTimMifsud]

@ all good. Thanks for helping me out with such a fast response. I’ll look at the X24 instead

[@UrielVentris1984]

so depressing. as i was looking forward to these. oh well guess il stick with exos standard drives. could you make a video that showcases the difference between the new ironworf pros with 550 tb workload a year and exos they seem really similar.?

[@George-664]

Need independent actuator for each plate.

[@InspectorGadget2014]

PS: when you state the Reason number X on screen, could you show it for just a little bit more time please? I believe you now show it for 4 seconds, 6 seconds would be better to be able to read it (for non-native English speakers) Back on topic; nice technology, too bad they will not allow you to do your infamous magic on it, yet. I don't know the price (I expect quite expensive per TB) but with the prices of "regular" (SATA) HD's and (M.2) cache, would that not be a decent, more affordable solution? Next to more proven technology at this moment. (I know Seagate has been working on this since 2020) I also expect this HD to run more quite hot plus more power consumption. So perhaps also needs a beefer powersupply in a typical NAS? More noise is often due to more movements (and more vibrations) but to my ear it was only a couple of DB's less nosier. so not really earthmoving to me. The requirement for special LUN management can be a disadvantage as that limits the full potential of this drive to systems (NAS included) who do not support that. So a "happy few" situation, if not careful. I for one do find it exciting new technology but will be only happy when it becomes mainstream, universal and available to all. And to be honest, expecting the prices, I do not see that happening in the short future. BTW, I am a wee bit surprised it has a rather low amount of cache (256MB) for that kind of speedy drive? Computer science 1-0-1 teached me that higher speeds usually also means increasing caching to cope with any "speed-bumps" (pun intended) of the lesser-fast host? Via G00gle you can find already some benchmarks and the remarks about their findings. Very nice technology, excellent for datacenters, good-money paying customers etc. PS: they are sold per a carton of 100x ;-)

[@GajodeAlfama]

Hi, love your work. Does it work on DS423+ or older models? Seagate EXOS MACH.2 2x18 HDD VS Seagate IronWolf 8TB 7200RPM 256MB SATA III, what to buy? Waiting for the next video about the performance. Best regards.

[@leonpano]

You need device support SAS is not the connector, is the controller chip supporting SAS or not Is passible to pass SAS signal with sata cable

[@gshaw3000]

dose anyone know where one may buy these hdd's please?

[@konsul2006]

Thank you for the noise test.

[@KelvinKMS]

I am happy with my new WD Gold 20TB HDD with NAND built-in !!! It is actually crazy fast when you just moving files within 4GB !! When you move over 4GB, it will slow down to 285MB/s which is still the fastest HDD you can buy now !! worth the money !! I only trust WD HDD !! It never fail !! I had a very bad experience on Seagate. so I never buy any Seagate new drive anymore !!

[@KelvinKMS]

I think 4GB is it NAND size and it has 512MB cache too. so I think you just need to wait a few sec to let NAND write into drive. It calls defer writing. Very smart combination !!!

[@Angel24112411]

What happens when NAND cache wears out and starts developing errors ?

[@shanent5793]

These things only have a single SAS port, so you need to buy double the number to maintain redundancy. SATA versions only expose 1 LUN, with the LBAs split high and low. It would have been interesting if the heads read each others' tracks; that cuts access time in half

[@igmanfermont513]

Yeah NVME HDD sounds expensive. For most folks, either regular NAS drives and if speed is required an SSD NVME solution.

[@esphilee]

I don’t rust Seagate. All the harddisk failure that I have experienced in my life, was caused by seagate.

[@livingadreaminparadise9307]

How much Heat does it kick out

[@UrielVentris1984]

that really doesent seem cost effective, since ssds are so much faster and most enterprizes and the average gamer with access to primocache use ssds as thier cache, to speed up data, or just the disks in raid. regular exos drives are much much cheaper, and iron wolf... so i think 650-750 is too much for similar technology seagate may be shooting themselves in the foot no buisness except very high end would consider it, and onley because thier more durable then ssds, otherwise might as well go with standard high end cmr hdds. i think its likely the dual actuator tech and hammer that is pushing costs so high. but they wont sell unless the costs come down and ease of use goes up, id like to see them make a consumer level hdd that fast, that can play games. but were not there yet.

[@nickbarkas5774]

Probably these disks will not work on the vast majority of mainboards. Have not seen mach.2 hdds in any mainboard compat list yet...

[@TeresaGonzalez-ov1jm]

I bought this HDD and it's really quiet

[@kkndking]

i looked in to getting 1 last year you just can get one at that time

[@alexsarbu3978]

One big reason not to buy: Seagate. Seagull. Do you think that's a coincidence? ;)

[@nascompares]

....oh my god.... THIS GOES RIGHT TO THE TOP!!!!

[@Matlockization]

I wish I knew about this.