Wednesday, February 15th 2023
Western Digital Announces 22TB and 44TB WD Book Desktop Hard Drive
To help consumers preserve their ever-growing digital world, Western Digital's WD brand is expanding its trusted My Book Desktop Storage lineup. Built upon a legacy of technology innovation, the company has released its highest capacity consumer drive ever with the 22 TB My Book Desktop Hard Drive, giving people greater flexibility to store more of what they love.
"Consumers continue generating data at a rapid pace. In 2022 alone, the average household worldwide generated more than 20 TB of data and we expect this number to continue to rise as people continue to consume and create more data," said John Rydning, research vice president, Global DataSphere at International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market intelligence firm. "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."
With more than ten connected devices in the average American household, the new high-capacity solutions give people a significant amount of space to essentially help backup their personal devices—and possibly even those of their household's as well. Whether it's priceless photos and videos or a backup of their most important work files and applications, the WD brand seeks to offer people solutions that keep up with their evolving data storage needs.
"With multiple devices used in our everyday life, we have the ability to instantly create, consume and generate massive amounts of content," said Susan Park, vice president of product management at Western Digital. "Our goal is to help people easily and reliably store it all."
The 22 TB My Book offers users the ability to back up and preserve thousands of documents, photos, videos and other files from a variety of storage devices including portable SSDs and HDDs, memory cards and USB flash drives, consolidating them into one organized and easy to access location. For those looking for more robust storage capabilities, the My Book Duo is also now available in a 44 TB capacity, equipped with RAID-optimized Western Digital drives that are ready to perform at maximum speed and capacity right out of the box. My Book Duo can be reconfigured to RAID-1 for redundancy (data mirroring) or used as two independent drives (JBOD) with the included software.
Availability
The 22 TB My Book retails for $600 MSRP (£595) and the 44 TB My Book Duo retails for $1500 MSRP (£1490).
"Consumers continue generating data at a rapid pace. In 2022 alone, the average household worldwide generated more than 20 TB of data and we expect this number to continue to rise as people continue to consume and create more data," said John Rydning, research vice president, Global DataSphere at International Data Corporation (IDC), a global market intelligence firm. "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."
"With multiple devices used in our everyday life, we have the ability to instantly create, consume and generate massive amounts of content," said Susan Park, vice president of product management at Western Digital. "Our goal is to help people easily and reliably store it all."
The 22 TB My Book offers users the ability to back up and preserve thousands of documents, photos, videos and other files from a variety of storage devices including portable SSDs and HDDs, memory cards and USB flash drives, consolidating them into one organized and easy to access location. For those looking for more robust storage capabilities, the My Book Duo is also now available in a 44 TB capacity, equipped with RAID-optimized Western Digital drives that are ready to perform at maximum speed and capacity right out of the box. My Book Duo can be reconfigured to RAID-1 for redundancy (data mirroring) or used as two independent drives (JBOD) with the included software.
Availability
The 22 TB My Book retails for $600 MSRP (£595) and the 44 TB My Book Duo retails for $1500 MSRP (£1490).
28 Comments on Western Digital Announces 22TB and 44TB WD Book Desktop Hard Drive
If they follow the typical pricing trends, the 44TB model should be ~$1000.....otherwise we can just buy 2x of the 22TB and spend less $$ for the same amount of space....
Second hand though. The new was 270$
Mine power on time was 11000 hours when I got it :D
May be one day I will buy a new one.
There are apparently some problems with using those enterprise drives - they claim 5 year warranty. If you wish to claim it from the Toshiba or Seagate directly they direct you to the store you bought the drive from - those drives weren't meant to be sold to individual customers. And the stores only have obligation for 2 years of warranty, even if they claimed 5 years. Clear false advertising, but what are you going to do, sue them?
Also, they are all enterprise NAS drives, very loud and clicky for the extra bit of speed. I'd rather have a bit slower but quieter drive for desktop PC, but apparently they're not in demand any more...
One would hope that WD had learned their lesson about this but that’s a tough call.
IMO, if you buy a My Book Duo it should be because its cheaper then the individual drives and you plan to use the drives in a NAS, Server or PC. If not then the My Book Duo should be a backup that way the data is duplicated elsewhere.
Edit:
FWIW, these prices seem a wee bit high IMO. IIRC, the last WD 16TB drives I purchase (new, around the holiday season) were about ~$240 USD. I wonder if these 22TB drives are the new dual actuator drives,…..???
www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-gold-sata-hdd#WD221KRYZ
www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-red-pro-sata-hdd#WD221KFGX
As usual the problem comes from the cost of litigation vs letting it go.Higher density costs more money, it's not a linear curve of price/capacity. I honestly don't know what prices are like at the moment but the last 8tb drive (for shucking) I bought about 2 years ago was about 150$ so this doesn't look particularly interesting. Though I could see myself getting something similar to this for offsite backups if I ever start doing them :P
Let that sink in.
Take another breath.
44TB of data on RAID 0.
That is a lot of data to lose through double the risk.
I guess stores buy them cheaper by purchasing them as OEM drives to be sold as part of populated NAS, but then they sell them individually. And they deny the problem, or assure you with very weak promise.
"They were delivered today and first thing I checked their warranty and every single one shows basically this response from Seagate.
Please contact the place of purchase.
This product was originally sold as a part of a larger system. Please contact the system manufacturer or your place of purchase for warranty support.
I reached out to Newegg chat about this was their response.
If the item does not work within 5 years, you could contact the manufacturer to get the warranty assistance, if they do not help, you could reach back to us with their denial letter, we will further assist you."
Don't buy enterprise hard drives off Amazon...
Newegg Seagate Exos 18TB sold with no manufacture warranty.
PSA: Seagate now only honoring warranties from "trusted partners"
Of course this means even more complicated backup schemes besides "yeah, I have everything backed up on NAS with RAID 1, so basically three copies".
redundant array of inexpensive disks
redundant array of inexpensive disks
redundant array of inexpensive disks
redundant
It's in the frigin acronym! I mean I use RAID though not only do I believe in backups though cold-storage which means two backups, always one that is not connected to the grid in any way. Anyone putting 44TB of data on a RAID 0 without backup deserves the clamps!
At that point you're arguing "don't have so much data". :p
I had a RAID-6 with 4 disks running 2009 to 2018 and must have been lucky because only 2 of the 6 consumer drives (4 active, 2 spare) failed during that time period. It was really nice I could just pop in a replacement drive like nothing happened and have the array rebuild automatically. It finally ended when Window 10 forced an upgrade and blew away the driver stability and killed the array. Also I keep several backups hot and cold so availability to my data was never an issue and the hot backup meant I didn't have to actually restore anything (so minimal downtime) but just remap IP addresses for the hot unit that became the primary.
After that raid failure I switched to dedicated NAS units for awhile with RAID-1 until I jumped on the Synology bandwagon so I could have more redundancy and a bit more protection from bit rot again without it costing too much in my time or money to manage it. Luckily none of those home NAS units failed but I always have two NAS units at any time because yes, unit failure can happen, and if it does I have something to run on while looking for a replacement. Not having to wait to restore data over a 1Gbe network connection before data becomes available again is a real time saver.(from a home user perspective) Not having a lot of data helps keep costs down and potential data restore takes less time. One way of doing this is discriminating and organizing what data is most important for availability and redundancy. For example do you really need to have 5 backup copies of your ripped DVD collection that you host on Plex? Probably not, so you can plan for a lower cost data loss prevention solution for your DVD collection vs. your more important and probably smaller document files.
It's sad but I honestly don't know much that can be done without spending more than the product is worth. I'd press and threaten with a complain to regulators and start CC'ing consumer protection agencies but it's not like it's difficult for them to get a claim dismissed through whatever special circunstances they decide to make up.
Consumer protection laws in Europe are generally not that bad, but they're far from bulletproof
But anyway, someone has to pony up: either the seller because he wrongly sold drives not meant for retail or the oem as any oem. It's a matter of how willing you are to pursue it.
I guess that can be an advatage of shucking - if you keep the enclosure intact it's like it never happened and no way they can claim those were oem whatever drives.
And when the manufacturer says your drive isn't covered?
Well, receipt for your drive doesn't even state the length of yor warranty, the only thing that does is a line in specification (Warranty: 5 years). And if the store has a policy of only handling warranties up to 2 years, that will have a precedence, not a line in item's description.
It happened to me even at biggest retailer in Europe, Mindfactory, when the Corsair MP600 SSD drive failed - the store didn't even provide any links, just the line (in German) that lol, we're not responsible for the product any more, it' s over 24 months. Good luck enforcing the "extended" warranty then.