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

Product Information

If you want to buy a hard drive for a specialist business PC or the best gaming SSD for your PC or console, there are some additional considerations. The larger the drive, the higher the data transfer rate in general; Seagate quotes a 7.8% increase going from 12TB to 18TB, small but not-so-negligible. The numbers we recorded in our benchmark are unambiguous; this is a very, very fast hard disk drive when used as external storage.

Since your computers work 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: These drives have been in use for a few months with no issues. No complaints about the performance. is certainly a massive amount of data. Whilst some will easily be able to consume it all, many will never be able to need such large data storage. Therefore I recommend you look at your specific needs before choosing a hard drive capacity. Simply choosing the largest capacity drive you can find may not make the most sense. Having multiple copies of data for additional redundancy, it may be safer to have 2 (or more) smaller drives with the same copy of data, therefore reducing the event of data loss if a drive were to fail. If you can afford it though, get one of our best PS5 SSDs . Just bear in mind that the maximum capacity is 4TB, not 18 and that it will cost you more, much more. High capacityWhen it comes to performance, the IronWolf Pro 18TB is rated for an up to 260MB/s sustained transfer rate as well as an average latency of 4.16ms. As for power consumption, the drive is rated for up to 8W average operating power as well as 5.2W idle power. The features

By the spec sheet, the only difference between the Red Pro and Gold is the MTBF. In my machine side by side, I've found that to be very untrue. The Gold is quieter and noticeably faster. They're all on the same SATA III controller. Gold gets 50 MB/s faster transfer when past the write cash. That's 20% which is a pretty big difference for a drive that's claimed by the manufacturer to be "the same" spec. for write.Collin is the B2B Hardware Editor for TechRadar Pro. He has been in journalism for years, with experience in small and large markets, including Gearadical, DailyBeast, FutureNet, and more.