WD 22TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0

Product Information

While 30TB HDDs are nearly here, Seagate says that it has also managed to cram 5TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk in the lab, which opens doors to HDDs with capacities of 50TB and higher (assuming that the drives use 10 platters or more). For now, such disks are only used on spinstands, but as the company learns more about them, they will be moved to prototype drives and eventually to commercial HDDs. Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results.

Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB but swaps TLC for QLC. And here is how the WD Red Pro 22TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters): One common question is, " Is an SSD a hard drive?" While many might call an SSD (Solid State Drive) a hard drive out of habit, an SSD is quite different from a traditional HDD (Hard Disk Drive) with spinning platters in terms of design and performance. Without going too deep into the ' SSD vs HDD' debate, in essense, SSDs offer faster data access and are more durable due to the absence of moving parts, but typically have lower maximum storage capacities than HDDs and are more expensive. For instance, finding an SSD over 8TB can be challenging, while HDDs, while slower, can have capacities of 20TB or even more. Our first throughput test measures 4K random performance. Here, the WD Gold 22TB posted 107,303 IOPS in reads and 4,730 IOPS write (SMB). In comparison, the 12TB WD Ultrastar was able to reach 107,884 IOPS read and 5,600 IOPS write. The sides of the WD Red Pro 22TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 265MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens.

Our sequential figures, while at the point of 10GbE saturation for our two links, are also pretty close to what eight HDDs can push out if they are running with 290MB/s each. The company's publicly available roadmap indicates that Seagate intends to deliver 50+ TB hard drives in calendar 2026, so the HDD maker has plenty of time to polish off its 50TB media for mass production. 22TB and 24TB HDDs Due Shortly The Seagate 60TB SSD that was launched in 2016. It was a prototype but we don't know whether it was sold. I approached Seagate in May 2023 to find out what happened to it. Our 20TB product features 2TB per disk capacities and we have started to ramp the volume of 22TB products deployed on 2.2TB per disk capacities," said Mosley. "The 20+ TB platform is based on traditional PMR technology and some customers are choosing to enable SMR technology as an additional feature that slightly increases the drives capacity for certain applications. [… ] We are executing plans to deliver another 10% gain in per disk capacity for this PMR platform to offer drives in the mid- to upper 20TB range." First Loss in Years For our standard deviation latency results, the 22TB Gold model hit 0.09ms through 4.97ms (SMB). The 12TB WD Ultrastar fell behind in the terminal queue depths again, posting a range of 0.05ms to 7.22ms.

The right choice depends on various factors, including what you intend to store and transfer, and the volume of data involved. Whether you're upgrading your laptop's hard drive or equipping a network-attached storage (NAS) device with a high-speed option, understanding the nuances of different drives is crucial. Hard disk drives are cheap and offer plenty of capacity but they are bound to disappear in a not-so-distant future. Right now, the biggest portable hard disk drive has a capacity of 5TB; it uses a special drive that is slightly bigger than a standard laptop HDD which has a width of 2.5-inch and a height of 7mm. If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager. Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks, as well as widely-published values such as max 4K read and write speed and 8K 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise drives.

We also test power consumption and temperature. Power consumption will vary with drive performance, RPM, and more, and it’s important to look at four different cases: maximum power draw, average power draw, idle power draw, and workload efficiency. Power usage can add up with multiple drives. Temperature is also an important metric for hard drives, as overheating is a common cause of failure, particularly during sustained workloads. Moving on to max latency numbers, the 22TB WD Gold had a range of 10ms to 40.2ms while the 12TB WD Ultrastar showed 10.01ms through 87.95ms. The WD Gold 22TB features the same 2.5-million-hour MTBF rating as the other higher capacity models as well as vibration protection technology and a low power draw due to HelioSeal technology. As far as power management goes, the 22TB model has a slightly higher average operational draw at 7.1W compared to the 20TB model; however, its idling is an improved 5.7W. The next test was using ATTO disk benchmark and this one was using a 1GB and 4GB test file in the same windows PC test environment. However, this test was focused more on the IOPS. The random 4K operations of a hard drive will typically be hugely dwarfed by those of HDDs, but enterprise HDDs and pro series drives still tend to rate noticeably higher than domestic HDD and standard class NAS HDDs on this score.

We are working closely with a few strategic, large-scale customers to help define what archival storage may look like. Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Red Pro 22TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 18TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 20TB and 22TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS.It boasts exceptional read and write speeds; we recorded speeds of 286.8MB/s and 279.3MBps respectively in the 20TB iteration, based on testing via CrystalDiskMark, although This is roughly 10% faster than the previous 18TB drive and is sure to be beaten again by the newly launched 22TB iteration of the zippy HDD. We believe the future of archive storage is based on the hard drive. Our mission is to help solve the cold storage/deep archive problem and what that looks like, which may be, perhaps, a slightly different form or capability than today. Moving on to the max latency, the WD Gold recorded just 9.539ms read and 153ms write. In comparison, we saw the 12TB WD Ultrastar hit 403.113ms read and 114ms write. For performance, HDDs are also often gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is usually a direct indicator of performance. The RPM value impacts sequential transfers as well as random access latency. Lower RPM drives tend to be quieter and more efficient, while higher RPM drives have better performance. There are also variable RPM drives that try to achieve the best of both worlds. Power draw, heat, and noise are factors related to performance. Beyond sheer size, other factors such as the fastest hard drive and fastest SSD speed, as well as overall performance, play a critical role in our evaluation. Our guide also touches upon the best external hard drive and best portable SSD options available, ensuring that you find a balance between capacity, speed, and portability.

The WD Gold 22TB is a great addition to the company’s already extensive enterprise hard drive lineup, offering the industry’s highest areal density at 2.2TB per platter (alongside the WD Red for NAS solutions and WD Purple for surveillance setups). The extra 2TB in capacity over the 20TB HDDs certainly adds up if you’re using pallet-fulls of these drives in your data center. It is important to be aware of the drive’s form factor, with 3.5” being the most common for the best HDDs (this is the only type we cover). If you need 2.5”, your options are more limited, especially for capacity. Otherwise, your computer case’s ability to house a certain number of 3.5” drives might be your primary limitation. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some. Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place. With up to 2.5M hours MTBF 3, WD Gold hard drives deliver enhanced levels of dependability and durability.

Massive Capacity and Impressive Performance Potential

material/labor costs worldwide have spiked also which keeps cost up a but. Ssds have less material overall.