Seagate Exos X X20 20TB, 24/7, 512e/4Kn / 3.5" / SAS 12Gb/s

The Exos X20 is a welcome addition to Seagate’s enterprise hard drive lineup, offering the industry’s highest capacity in a 3.5-inch drive at 20TB. This is an improvement over the Exos X18, which maxed out at 18TB. The extra capacity adds up if you’re using many of these drives. This CMR-based drive also boasts a 2.5 million hour MTBF and is backed by a five-year warranty. Though we had no issues running our standard benchmarks on the Exos X20 20TB, it remains a mystery why it consistently underperformed Seagate’s own IronWolf Pro 20TB, which is mechanically the same (and we expected it to behave as such). Seagate says this is due to firmware differences, though didn’t elaborate beyond saying that the Exos line is more broadly optimized than the IronWolf Pro. Pricing is another interesting subject for the IronWolf Pro versus the Exos, where on paper the Exos has a higher MSRP, but street pricing has the Exos at a substantial discount to the IronWolf Pro. Nonetheless, the Exos X20 20TB’s high capacity, reliability ratings, and good, if not outstanding, performance are compelling reasons to consider it for your next datacenter deployment.