In short: Are you the digital equal of a hoarder, unable or unwilling to delete the gigabytes of information compulsively collected over time? In that case, you may be to know concerning the new exterior laborious disk drive from Western Digital that boasts an unimaginable 44TB of storage. Sadly, it prices about the identical value as many PCs—or an RTX 4080.

Western Digital had already been promoting variations of the dual-drive My Ebook Duo that provide between 16TB and 36TB of storage capability. However the latest 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 Book model, which it says is its highest-capacity client drive up to now. Nonetheless, Tom’s Hardware writes that WD has been promoting 22TB network-attached storage drives since July final yr. The sealed and ready-to-use My Ebook exterior drives are more likely to show extra well-liked than single NAS drives, although.

The 44TB My Ebook 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 Kind-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 techniques 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 Ebook prices $599, which is round $100 greater than the 22TB inner laborious drive Western Digital sells. The 44TB My Ebook Duo is a painful $1,499. They’re obtainable now and work with Home windows 10 and Home windows 11, in addition to macOS 11 and later (by way of the NTFS driver), permitting customers to work between the Microsoft and Apple working techniques without having to reformat.

Exterior HDDs may be loads slower than their solid-state counterparts, however they make up for it in capability and value. As Ars Technica notes, WD’s largest exterior SDD reaches 32TB and prices $7,500, although that mannequin is aimed toward skilled customers.

One purpose to splash out on a 44TB exterior HDD comes from a current analysis report on laborious drive failure charges. It discovered that smaller-capacity HDDs are more suspensible to failure as they age.


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