In short: Are you the digital equal of a hoarder, unable or unwilling to delete the gigabytes of information compulsively collected over time? If that’s the case, you could be to know in regards to the new exterior exhausting disk drive from Western Digital that boasts an unimaginable 44TB of storage. Sadly, it prices about the identical worth as many PCs—or an RTX 4080.
Western Digital had already been promoting variations of the dual-drive My E-book Duo that provide between 16TB and 36TB of storage capability. However the newest entry within the lineup packs two 22TB drives for a large 44TB of unformatted capability to “assist customers protect their ever-growing digital world,” as WD places it.
The corporate has additionally launched a brand new 22TB-capacity single-drive My E-book mannequin, which it says is its highest-capacity shopper drive up to now. Nonetheless, Tom’s {Hardware} writes that WD has been promoting 22TB network-attached storage drives since July final 12 months. The sealed and ready-to-use My E-book exterior drives are prone to show extra widespread than single NAS drives, although.
The 44TB My E-book Duo comes with a USB-C port with assist for as much as 5Gbps transfers and two USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 Sort-A ports, turning it right into a quasi-docking station. It ships in a RAID 0 configuration designed to squeeze extra pace out of these HDDs and let methods see them as a single drive, however customers can swap to RAID 1 for redundancy and see each drives individually. It additionally options 256-bit AES {Hardware} Encryption with password safety software program.
Such huge quantities of storage in an exterior enclosure do not come low cost. The 22TB single-drive My E-book prices $599, which is round $100 greater than the 22TB inside exhausting drive Western Digital sells. The 44TB My E-book Duo is a painful $1,499. They’re out there now and work with Home windows 10 and Home windows 11, in addition to macOS 11 and later (through the NTFS driver), permitting customers to work between the Microsoft and Apple working methods with no need to reformat.
Exterior HDDs could be lots slower than their solid-state counterparts, however they make up for it in capability and worth. As Ars Technica notes, WD’s largest exterior SDD reaches 32TB and prices $7,500, although that mannequin is geared toward skilled customers.
One motive to splash out on a 44TB exterior HDD comes from a latest analysis report on exhausting drive failure charges. It discovered that smaller-capacity HDDs are extra suspensible to failure as they age.