Western Digital Unpacks 22TB HDDs So You'll Almost Never Have To Delete A File Again
Some of you showed up here with pitchforks in hand and ready to argue that even 22 terabytes of storage space isn't enough to ensure never having to send a file to the recycle bin ever again. Fair enough, but headline quibbling aside, a 22TB hard disk drive (HDD) is a whole lot of storage for the average person, and is now available to both consumers and enterprise customers.
Western Digital has officially won the race to 22TB in a single-drive solution for retail, having now expanded the monstrous capacity from its Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD for servers to its Purple Pro (surveillance), Red Pro (NAS boxes), and Gold (enterprise) product lines.
"We are thrilled to reach this milestone as HDDs are complex and sophisticated systems," said Ravi Pendekanti, senior vice president of product management and marketing, HDD Business Unit at Western Digital. "From the cloud to the edge, Western Digital's hard drives play a vital role in storing, protecting, capturing and analyzing data that's shaping nearly every aspect of our digital lives. Our technology leadership and expanded portfolio of industry-leading HDDs provide us with a tremendous opportunity to deliver value to our customers today and well into the future."
All four helium-filled drive lines share a similar makeup, leveraging OptiNAND technology, energy-assisted PRM (ePRM), and a triple-stage actuator navigated a stack of ten 2.2TB platters. They all also share the same 3.5-inch form factor with a SATA 6Gbps interface, 7,200 RPM spindle speed, and beefy 512MB of cache.
Looking at the retail models, the 22TB Red Pro and Purple Pro are both rated to deliver a maximum sustained data rate of 265MB/s, while the Gold model bumps that up to 291MB/s. As for durability, the mean time before failure (MTBF) rating the Gold and Purple Pro models is 2.5 million ours, and 1 million hours for the Red Pro.
The 22TB Red Pro, 22TB Purple Pro, and 22TB Gold are all available now for $599.99. Pricey upfront, but that also works out to less than 3 cents per gigabyte.
