High speed 18TB Seagate Exos 2X18 HDD narrows gap with SATA SSDs

The Seagate Exos 2X18 hard drive is available to buy from Insight priced at $659.99 - and while it isn’t exactly the Black Friday bargain of the year, that’s $19 off the usual price of $679.

Aimed at data center and enterprise workloads, this 18TB model stands out for more than just raw capacity – it’s fast.

The Exos 2X18 uses Seagate’s Mach.2 dual actuator design, which splits the drive’s mechanics into two independent actuator assemblies that work in parallel. The result is quoted sequential transfer rates of up to 554MBps for reads and 528MBps for writes, roughly double a typical 7200rpm enterprise HDD.