Seagate's Exos X18 family is designed for large-scale data centres, and is said to be particularly suitable for big data, distributed file systems, enterprise backup and restore, and centralised surveillance.

The Exos X18 (also available in a 16TB version) comes with SAS or SATA interfaces, with the option of self-encryption.

The helium-filled, conventional magnetic recording drives support hot plugging and feature Seagate's PowerBalance technology that allows a trade-off between performance and power consumption.

They have an MTBF of 2.5 million hours and a five-year limited warranty.

"Seagate's Exos X18 hard drives enable enterprises to effectively tackle challenges associated with the exponential rise in data volumes by increasing system capacity and reducing deployment complexity," said Seagate Technology vice president and general manager of enterprise data solutions Ken Claffey.

"With the ever-increasing demand from enterprise data centres for greater storage capacity and efficiency, Seagate offers the industry's leading density and configurability with ease of deployment for data lakes and private storage clouds."

The Exos X18 18TB hard drive has a recommended price of $1019.