SeagateExos X20 20TB Internal Hard Drive - 3.5 Inch Hyperscale SATA 6Gb/s HDD, 7200 RPM, 2.5M MTBF, 512e and 4Kn FastFormat, Low Latency with Enhanced Caching (ST20000NM007D)

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.

quiet, reasonably fast and a great size; try to buy it when the price is low (Black Friday, Amazon Prime Day, etc.)

So far the drive is working great! Installed with zero issues.

As expected from Amazon and Seagate, excellent!

seagate is highly reliable and the brand makes good quality products. drives still have defects and the one i had bought arrived faulty. it was packed in a small box dual layers of boxes and bubble wrap, it was well packed. since i did not need the drive just yet it sat on my desk unused untested for a few weeks, the return window is 30 days. i loaded into the hotswap nas cage and the drive immediately started to make a loud humming sound. i have used these drives for years and its not the typical sound it makes under normal operation. the drive reads/writes fine, smart data says the drive is 100% healthy but it has tons of sound and vibration just even powered on and not connected to the file system. when you have this much sound and vibration its always a prefail condition.the sellers return terms are just horrific. you are required to have the original box or you will be charged a 50% restocking fee. 50% of 378 for a 20 tb drive is 189 dollars to return a product if you don't have original packaging. if you look at the page again as of 12/5/24 the return terms are edited and omit having original packaging. if you contact amazon support its pretty hard since they dont understand the problem. so let me be extremely clear, the sellers terms are made so you only have 30 days to return a product and return requirements often will exclude/limit your ability to return a product leaving you with a very expensive paperweight.avoid buying from this seller, read the sellers terms on how and when items can be returned and if you are required to have the original box. if the return window is small and original packaging or % stocking fees are required avoid the seller and go elsewhere.

I bought two of these drives to backup data from a server, and I can say that they are fast, and not terribly noisy. They have great capacity for the money and I definitely recommend them. Although this has NOTHING to do with the manufacturer of this drive, I really wish that manufacturers would advertise the proper capacity of hard drives. The formatted capacity is based on 1000 instead of 1024 as is used in computers, so you will get 16.3TB out of this 18TB drive. Keep this in mind when planning capacity.Since your computers works on the binary system, there is an increment of 2 to the 10th power or 1,024 in each storage level. Therefore, in the computer system:Kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 BytesMegaByte (MB) = 1,024 Kilobytes or 1,048,576 BytesGigabyte (GB) = 1,024 Megabytes or 1,073,741,824 BytesTerabyte (TB) = 1,024 Gigabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 BytesThe only real issue I had with these drives is Amazon. Amazon shipped FOUR of these drives in plastic envelopes with NO padding of any kind... just bare drives. This is unacceptable. Be careful and do not accept drives that are not shipped properly, as there can be severe damage by mishandling.

When I worked in a web host and data center nearly 15 years ago, the number one "problem company" we had for drive reliability and RMAs was Seagate. It was 10's of percents worse failure rates than the nearest competitor. It's been a decade since I worked there, and thought "Maybe they've changed, they're still around after all."The first drive I received made a hideous screeching noise and was dead on arrival. The replacement seems to be working fine for now.Oh Seagate, never change.

So I don’t write too many reviews, but I wanted to put this together for people who are as confused as I was about whether or not these drives are loud.Before I settled on these, I read tons of reviews on Newegg and Amazon and it seemed like a pretty even split between people who think these drives are horrendously loud, and people who think they are silent as the grave.The short answer seems to be, they are both.The key is how they’re being used.In my experience, these drives are silent until a couple of seconds into a large data transfer. After that, they start to make some noise, and it is significant. I wouldn’t want to listen to it for a long time. However, in my use case, (a personal home media server that only I use) I never reach the maximum speed of the drives (around 250mb per second) unless I am transferring whole shows onto the drive, or exporting them to an external device, and in that case, the transfers do not last long. Also, I am not seated next to the computer when tranferring large files so the sound is quieter from a short distance.My advice when purchasing these drives is to think about your use case. Mainly, how often will you need to move files that are bigger than just a couple gigabytes? Because that is when the louder, more concerning noises will occur.Also, consider setting up your pc so that the drives never disengage or “spin down” once the pc is on. There is a delay of several seconds before you can access files and a lot of noise when the drives first spin up before they settle into silent operation. (Personally, I like the sound they make when they spin up, but I wouldn’t want them doing that all the time. It’s bad for them. ((I know that is contested, but I’m saying it anyway, since I think the people on the other side of that argument are wrong.))