WD 18TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

Product Information

When you compare the cost to that of a bare mechanism and a simple USB enclosure, the G-DRIVE Desktop Drive is one of the more expensive ways to get extra space, and it's also relatively slow compared to SSD drives. Where can you get it?Widely available from the larger online retailers in most regions and directly from Western Digital. Western Digital's representatives tell us that the company's Gold drives can best be considered as a subset of its Ultrastar DC line—all Gold disks have technically identical Ultrastar equivalents, but not all Ultrastar disks have Gold equivalents. The Gold product line are all enterprise drives—but the entire line-up is all-SATA, all-CMR, all the time. Drives in the broader Ultrastar line-up may offer SATA or SAS interfaces, and either conventional or shingled magnetic recording. Not sure how those economics work for you, but if you don’t mind voiding the warranty, this pricing makes it a little cheaper to buy a 4TB model and a retail 18TB drive and swap them than buy the 18TB option. And, competing against its own products, Western Digital makes the excellent My Book Duo, where the 16TB drive (2 x 8TB) is a little more than the 18TB G-DRIVE Desktop Drive but offers a resilient mirroring option and allows the users to change the drives.

Read and write speed may vary depending on the host device, read and write conditions, and file size. Hard disk drives still make up the most of the storage market both in the enterprise and in the consumer markets in terms of capacity. However, they’re stalling with CMR reaching a plateau and SMR, proving to be a poisoned chalice and not a technology that will get NAS owners enthused. Why they provide such a high-quality cable is a mystery because the physical hard drives in this series can’t manage 2Mbit/s transfers going downhill on a windy day. As well engineered as the new G-Drive Desktop is, and it is lovely, in a direct comparison with the mostly plastic opposition from Seagate, this product is expensive. The maximum usable data density on a magnetic recording device is limited by three competing factors. Magnetic coercivity—the strength of magnetic field required to demagnetize a domain—must be high enough to prevent the separately recorded grains from influencing one another and corrupting data. The field strength of the write head must be high enough to overcome the coercivity of the medium. Finally, the size of the field generated by the write head must be small enough so as not to overwrite adjacent areas.And, worryingly, where SanDisk previously provided both USB-A and USB-C cables, the new design comes exclusively with a single USB-C cable. Hard drives have moving parts, and over time the motors, heads, and actuators fail. SMART is useful for finding predictive failures and removing a device before the data is lost, but this is tedious for novice users to understand (although I will show you how later). HDDs exhibit a bathtub curve for failures, with device failures increasing as time increases, rapidly accelerating after the 5 year warranty on most models. Device time is measured in power on hours, not physical time (as time with the disk powered off for extended periods of time does not count towards device wear). To make it even more complicated, the higher the workload and temperature the drive was used at, the faster it will fail. In short, the new G-DRIVE Desktop Drive is cheaper than it once was, but it’s still markedly overpriced for what it offers. Maybe G-DRIVE hardware is mostly bought by Apple owners, or they don’t think that Apple users could work out how to reformat and so burdened Windows users with that job. Why they didn’t just format it with something both systems would understand isn’t obvious.

Instead of having files and data stored locally on your computer, they're stored in a hard drive connected to a network—which is made accessible to any permitted user within that network. It's an elegant solution for folks who need access to files on multiple devices or if several people in the same building want to store data in a centralized location. Given the premium price of this drive, it was disappointing to see that Western Digital provides no software with this unit at all, assuming the customer has that already. Both the Western Digital G-Drive 18TB and LaCie d2 Professional 18TB are perfect for storing massive quantities of data whilst offering very fast data access. They both feature 7200 RPM drives for fast data transfers. The LaCie includes a Thunderbolt 3 interface where the Western Digital only USB 3.0. You need to move up to the Western Digital G-Drive Pro 18TB to get the faster Thunderbolt 3 interface. They feature aluminium cases for improved heat distribution. Hard drives can get quite hot under continuous load, therefore having adequate ventilation will help extend the longevity of the drive. Tip – how to measure drive lifetime with SMART. You can install smart sudo apt install smartmontools The drive comes with a five-year warranty with a three-year subscription to Seagate’s Rescue Data Recovery Plan. Once registered, you will be able to benefit from what Seagate calls “a global team of world-class data recovery experts in case of unexpected data loss” with a claimed successful data recovery rate of 90%. Note that the service is not available in all countries.Operational Data - represents data that is used to support your daily workflows, such as documents, images or videos. For such a large drive this would typically be needed for larger files such as with video or virtual machine files. Apple users can use Time Machine, and Windows users can use whatever sync tools they have to hand, if any.

Finance is only available to permanent UK residents aged >18, subject to status, terms and conditions apply. Consumer-targeted SMR disks—like the much-maligned Western Digital Red and small desktop drives from Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital—are drive-managed SMR. The firmware and processor on the drive itself manage aligning writes to zones, garbage collection as zones are rewritten, and everything else necessary to at least attempt to make the SMR drive perform to the levels expected to accommodate a typical consumer workload. Having it made from metal might have made more sense if the enclosure was designed to be reused, but the maker doesn’t encourage that, confusingly. Other than that, installation is remarkably straightforward since SanDisk doesn’t provide any software utilities, relying instead on the customers to provide those.

Understanding the Magnetic Recording Trilemma

Further Reading HAMR don’t hurt ’em—laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020Earlier this year, rival drive vendor Seagate promised to deliver 18TB and 20TB drives in 2020, but they have not yet materialized in retail channels. And while it does both those things admirably, it also makes the unit heavy and unsuitable to put in a laptop bag with a computer. With its external PSU, sharp edges and multiple USB cables, this drive needs its own bag for carrying, and it isn’t that portable. The new design has more plastic and less metal, but this hardware is still substantially a heatsink, and our review model weighed 1323g with the 12TB drive inside.

Currently, the largest capacity conventional hard drives Western Digital make is 22TB. But we’re confident that when they make larger ones, they’ll probably extend this series to accommodate those increased capacities. Klarna Bank AB (publ) is Authorised by the Swedish Financial Services Authority (Finansinspektionen) and is subject to limited regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority. When we return to conventional spinning disks, the difference between the performance of these are capable, and NAND flash is enormous. External storage is currently going through a transition away from conventional magnetic storage devices to solid state, specifically NAND-based SSDs.We’re not at the point where SSD storage compares to this solution in terms of cost per GB and sizes available, but eventually, it will happen. With no resilience against drive failure in this design, what you’re gambling on is the quality of the mechanism and data recovery if you pay the extra Western Digital wants each year for that potential safety net. SanDisk delivers the drive pre-formatted with APFS for the Apple macOS, something that will cause some confusion with Windows owners who aren’t familiar with how to reformat drives. Definition of capacity: One terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes, but storage capacity actually available may vary depending on operating environment and formatting. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary. Currently, there are five capacity options for the new G-DRIVE Desktop Drive that include 4TB, 6TB, 12TB, 18TB and 22 TB drives.