This company you've never heard of sells the world’s cheapest 18TB HDD

[Karlston]

This company you've never heard of sells the world’s cheapest 18TB HDD

Western Digital’s 18TB Red Pro HDD makes an early debut

•  
•  
•  
•  

(Image credit: Water Panther/Amazon)

 

When Western Digital introduced its latest WD Red Pro hard drives featuring 16TB and 18TB capacities earlier this week, the company said that the products would be available sometimes in October. 

 

As it now turns out, the HDDs for 24-bay enterprise-grade NAS are already available at Amazon, but they are rebadged and come under a little-known brand. Good news is that they cost less than $500. 

 

Western Digital’s WD Red Pro 16TB and 18TB HDDs are based on the same 6th Generation HelioSeal platform that is used for the company’s latest Ultrastar HC550 and WD Gold drives. 

 

These platform features Western Digital’s energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technology (a type of conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology that ensures predictable read and write speeds), nine platters, and triple-stage actuators (TSA).  

 

The new hard drives are equipped with a dual-attached 7200-RPM motor, a 512 MB cache buffer, and feature a SATA 6 Gbps interface. From performance point of view, the 18TB part is said to offer an up to 272 MB/s host to drive transfer rate, whereas the 16TB model is slightly slower at 259MB/s.

A cheap 18TB HDD?

 

Like other hard drives for enterprise-grade NAS with up to 24 bays, the new WD Red Pro HDDs are designed for 24/7 operation and feature similar reliability technologies found in enterprise-grade nearline drives to provide steady performance in highly-vibrating environments. Meanwhile, the drives come with special firmware optimizations for enterprise-grade NAS RAID environments designed for automatic error recovery, quicker RAID array rebuilds and expansions, and lower noise levels.

 

 

(Image credit: Water Panther/Amazon)

 

Officially, the WD Red Pro 18TB is set to hit the market in October, but the product is already available at Amazon. Officially, the drives come from a company called Water Panther and do not carry any Western Digital’s logotypes or brands. Meanwhile, the mention of the triple-stage actuator technology along with a 512MB buffer clearly point to Western Digital, which happens to be the only company that offers such a combination of features. 

 

 

The most interesting part is that the Water Panther NAS HDD 18TB is priced at $479.99 (~$27 per TB), which is not only considerably lower than the price of other 18TB hard drives, but is also below MSRPs of some advanced 16TB models. 

 

Water Panther specializes on selling storage devices compatible with servers by makers like Dell and HPE. Typically, such drives are made by various producers like Seagate, Toshiba, or Western Digital, and then equipped with an optimized firmware. But in case of NAS HDDs, there is hardly any tangible difference between Water Panther’s and original versions.

 

 

(Image credit: Western Digital)

 

 

This company you've never heard of sells the world’s cheapest 18TB HDD

 

[tommiy]

Thats a cheap drive. Actually interested I'm going to have to now go and look at Water Panther some more. Thanks.

[BimBamSmash]

I tend to think about the hassle of backups and restores when I encounter storage of this magnitude.

 

If the disk is tied up in a RAID, then in the event of a failure it is going to take very, very long for a newly wired disk to get into a complete parity state with the others. If one's luck had dried up - as mine's once did - another disk might fail at the same time!

 

If the disk is not wired in a RAID configuration - be it hardware or software - then manual backups and restores can be quite a challenge. I'd doubt it gets done ever.

 

If the disk is not in a RAID configuration, and no manual backups are made on a timely manner either, then that 18 TB can be lost at any time with no warning signs.

 

Until they overhaul these hardware in such a way that huge chunks of data can travel lightning fast from one disk to another, I'd vote for a cluster of smaller-sized disks, that are tied up together with a combo of hardware and software RAID. Easier and faster to backup and restore; easier to find replacement disks; and chances of compatibility issues are little to none.