Seagate · Data-centre drive · ST16000NM000J
Seagate Exos X18 16TB
Sold for data centres, but underneath it's a standard 3.5in SATA drive and any NAS with a 3.5in bay will take it without complaint.
- Capacity
- 16 TB
- Recording
- CMR
- Speed
- 7,200 rpm
- Warranty
- 5 years
- Workload
- 550 TB/yr
- Failure rate
- AFR 2.22% average
Good for
- Busy arrays (550 TB a year)
- Big media libraries
- RAID, SHR and ZFS rebuilds
- 5 years' warranty
Not for
- A desk or bedroom (7,200 rpm is the louder class)
Updated 27 Oct 2026 · Method 2.0
Who the Exos X18 16 TB is for
It's at home in a rack or a garage, where 7,200 rpm of spinning rust can whirr away all day without bothering anyone. Seagate backs it for five years, which is a long time in drive terms. Recording is CMR, the right kind for RAID and ZFS.
Watch out for
It's a 7,200 rpm drive and you'll hear it working.
On Backblaze's numbers it's neither better nor worse than the median, at 2.22% AFR with an interval that straddles 1.38%. Seagate's datasheet puts it at 28 dB idle and 32 dB seeking. Power draw is 5.1 W idle on Seagate's figures, or 45 kWh a year if it spends the whole year idling. Put four in RAID 5 and you'll have 48 TB to fill (Windows will call it 43.7 TB).
Specifications
Each value links to the Seagate page or datasheet it came from.
Sources: seagate.com
Failure rate
5 failures in 226 drive-years, across the 167 that Backblaze runs as ST16000NM000J, works out at 2.22% a year. Its 95% interval is 0.72% to 5.17%, a range wide enough to include the 1.38% median.
Median lifetime AFR across Backblaze drive models: 1.38%
Source: Backblaze Drive Stats, lifetime to Q2 2026. Bear in mind that's data-centre use, which is a lot harder on a drive than a home NAS will ever be.