B&H is listing this drive for $449.99 with a coupon for $110.00 that gets applied to your shopping cart at check-out, for a final cost of $339.99
This translates to $18.89 per TB, which is the lowest price available for any 18 TB drives that I could find. It is also the lowest price I have seen for this model drive in months.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1639085-REG/seagate_stkp18000400_stkp_18tb_expansion_desktop.html
There is a limit of 5 units that you can add to your cart. The $110 coupon will get applied to each one.
If you want more than 5, I suspect that all that you would have to do is place multiple orders.
It appears that it comes with a 1 year warranty, which does not speak well for Seagate’s faith in this drive’s endurance for going the long haul.
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WIth proper care these should last a while. Not the best drives out there, but with proper care these should last a while.
If planning to shuck I would personally run extensive checks to make sure the health of the drive is good. I had only a handful of drives fail on me back in the burstcoin days, but seagate was the most frustrating because I had extra drives that I was getting to and got stuck with a dead seagate drive on day 1, outside of the store return period and seagate sent me an external with a “refurbished” branding on it. Paid full retail price, got stuck with a refurb 
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Just for ~$30 extra ($362) you can buy an exos 18TB on Amazon. No need to shuck anything and it has 5 year warranty.
I already RMA’d one HDD that had a sudden malfunction on the first week of use. Seagate replaced it no problem.
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Drives that are properly maintained will, if bad, fail within a week or two – which was the case with your failure. In other words, if you purchased a lemon, it will reveal itself as so, soon after you start using it.
If after a few weeks, the drive does not fail, it will probably last beyond its warranty period, assuming you are not overheating your drives (blow a fan on them) or exposing them directly to your public utility’s power grid (use a good UPS, etc).
I suspect that these cheaper drives have a far better chance of failing a year or two later, when not properly maintained, as noted above. I further suspect that most folks do none of the above, which is why Seagate does not want to take back countless drives that were not properly cared for over the years.
The Exos drives cost more, and I am guessing that they probably have better surge suppression built in, and can withstand more public power grid hits.
The Exos drives will probably be better performers, too. But performance is not necessarily correlated to reliability. But with a 5 year warranty, I am guessing that the Exos drives have better quality parts?
Or does Seagate’s research show that most of their Exos drives are used in air conditioned, clean power, computer rooms? So Seagate knows that those drives are unlikely to fail?
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Yup, the 1-2 week period makes sense. That was usually the case with all my drives in the past.
As far as seagate warranty is concerned I would assume “likely use case” factors into their decisions. I can’t imagine many people will be lugging around these 3.5" externals WITH power bricks often, but maybe it’s just a segment of the market I never encountered 
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Most travelers are using usb drives, m.2 drives in enclosures or 2.5" drives in enclosures. The short warranty gives them an easy out without much public backlash due to the fact that it is a legitimate concern on their end. Those worried travelers can get extra coverage via Allstate/Squaretrade for a few bucks.
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