Going large: WD brings out external 22TB hard drive for consumers
Looking for big storage? Western Digital has introduced the WD 22TB My Book desktop hard drive – its highest capacity consumer drive to date.
The drive, which is formatted exFAT for both PCs and Macs out of the box, has USB 3.2 Gen 1 connectivity, which supports transfer speeds of up to 5 Gigabits per second. It’s also compatible with USB 2.0.
Some people might find it hard to imagine what you’d need a 22TB drive for, but our need for more storage is growing as we generate or consume more data from, say, videos with 8K resolution. There was a time when 1TB was incredible, or even 1GB. In fact, I remember an animation-creating friend throwing a party in his Hong Kong studio when he received his first 1GB drive in 1991.
“Consumers continue generating data at a rapid pace,” Western Digital quotes International Data Corporation research vice president John Rydning as saying. “In 2022 alone, the average household worldwide generated more than 20TB of data and we expect this number to continue to rise as people continue to consume and create more data.
“While many people rely on the cloud, we know consumers are looking for local storage at their fingertips to help them preserve and readily control their growing amount of personal and business data.”
The 22TB hard drive comes with built-in 256-bit AES hardware encryption with password protection and is also equipped with backup software.
Western Digital has also announced that the My Book Duo RAID storage device now comes in 44TB capacity, equipped with two WD drives that are formatted NTFS for Windows compatibility. Software is included to reconfigure the My Book Duo to RAID-1 for redundancy (data mirroring), or the two drives can be operated independently.
WD 22TB My Book desktop hard drive price
Australian pricing is unavailable at the moment, but the US price is US$599.99 MRSP. The 44TB My Book Duo retails for US$1499.99 MRSP.
