Western Digital unveils a 44TB external HDD with a flagship graphics card price

[midian182]

In brief: Are you the digital equivalent of a hoarder, unable or unwilling to delete the gigabytes of files compulsively collected over the years? If so, you might be interested to know about the new external hard disk drive from Western Digital that boasts an incredible 44TB of storage. Sadly, it costs about the same price as many PCs—or an RTX 4080.

Western Digital had already been selling versions of the dual-drive My Book Duo that offer between 16TB and 36TB of storage capacity. But the latest entry in the lineup packs two 22TB drives for a massive 44TB of unformatted capacity to "help consumers preserve their ever-growing digital world," as WD puts it.

The My Book Duo

The company has also introduced a new 22TB-capacity single-drive My Book model, which it says is its highest-capacity consumer drive to date. However, Tom's Hardware writes that WD has been selling 22TB network-attached storage drives since July last year. The sealed and ready-to-use My Book external drives are likely to prove more popular than single NAS drives, though.

The 44TB My Book Duo comes with a USB-C port with support for up to 5Gbps transfers and two USB 3.2 Gen 1/USB 3.0 Type-A ports, turning it into a quasi-docking station. It ships in a RAID 0 configuration designed to squeeze more speed out of those HDDs and let systems see them as a single drive, but users can switch to RAID 1 for redundancy and see both drives individually. It also features 256-bit AES Hardware Encryption with password protection software.

The single-drive My Book

Such vast amounts of storage in an external enclosure don't come cheap. The 22TB single-drive My Book costs $599, which is around $100 more than the 22TB internal hard drive Western Digital sells. The 44TB My Book Duo is a painful $1,499. They are available now and work with Windows 10 and Windows 11, as well as macOS 11 and later (via the NTFS driver), allowing users to work between the Microsoft and Apple operating systems without needing to reformat.

External HDDs might be a lot slower than their solid-state counterparts, but they make up for it in capacity and price. As Ars Technica notes, WD's largest external SDD reaches 32TB and costs $7,500, though that model is aimed at professional users.

One reason to splash out on a 44TB external HDD comes from a recent research report on hard drive failure rates. It found that smaller-capacity HDDs are more suspensible to failure as they age.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/97628-western-digital-unveils-44tb-external-hdd-flagship-graphics.html

 

[psycros]

Finally, some adequate storage for my ever-expanding collection of waifu GIFs.

 

[RudyBob]

That's a tonnes of data to lose

 

[TheBigT42]

It would be nice to know what model of drives are in it.

NewEgg has "WD Red Pro WD221KFGX 22TB" and "WD Gold WD221KRYZ 22TB 7200" Both priced at $499.99
For $350 you can get WD Gold 20TB WD201KRYZ. $150 premium is a lot to pay for 2TB

 

[waclark]

$1,500 for 44Tb? Doesn't sound all that bad to me. I used to sell high-end, enterprise storage. 20 years ago, a single RAID storage array would cost 10s of thousands of dollars and provide maybe a couple of TB of usable capacity. It also required a data center to power and cool the devices. 44Tb on your desktop is almost ridiculous.

 

[hwertz]

$1,500 for 44Tb? Doesn't sound all that bad to me. I used to sell high-end, enterprise storage. 20 years ago, a single RAID storage array would cost 10s of thousands of dollars and provide maybe a couple of TB of usable capacity. It also required a data center to power and cool the devices. 44Tb on your desktop is almost ridiculous.

It doesn't sound that bad until you see you can get 18TB drives for like $280 (I got a refurb with like 1 hour runtime on the disk for $180) . You're paying a lot more per disk for those extra 4TB (especially given, at least in the case of the drive I got, the 22TB drive is just the 18TB disk using SMR recording.) And then an a bit more than that for having 2 disks put into an enclosure. (That said, more power to them, the hard disk vendors have to make profits somewhere to pay for the R&D for bigger disks.)

 

[Soulburn74]

If you are going to spend that much for storage for hoarding might as well get a raid controller and your own drives, so you can control the raid level, have hot spares etc. (and buy a few extra drives for when you need spares). Sure its more, but when you are talking multiple 10's of TB's I want more redundancy and performance choices. I don't want 44TB in a raid 1, only getting 22 TB. I also don't want a raid 0 for archive purposes as if you lose one, you lose it all...... For archive purposes of large amounts of data, I want raid 5 or 6.

 

[hwertz]

If you are going to spend that much for storage for hoarding might as well get a raid controller and your own drives, so you can control the raid level, have hot spares etc. (and buy a few extra drives for when you need spares). Sure its more, but when you are talking multiple 10's of TB's I want more redundancy and performance choices. I don't want 44TB in a raid 1, only getting 22 TB. I also don't want a raid 0 for archive purposes as if you lose one, you lose it all...... For archive purposes of large amounts of data, I want raid 5 or 6.

I'm not even sure that it would cost more -- given how much less the 20TB or 18TB cost, you could get 3 or 4 of those and still have some cash left over to buy an inexpensive system to put the drives in to. I personally favor using Linux MD (software RAID) over using a hardware RAID controller but either would work well I think.

 

[waclark]

It doesn't sound that bad until you see you can get 18TB drives for like $280 (I got a refurb with like 1 hour runtime on the disk for $180) . You're paying a lot more per disk for those extra 4TB (especially given, at least in the case of the drive I got, the 22TB drive is just the 18TB disk using SMR recording.) And then an a bit more than that for having 2 disks put into an enclosure. (That said, more power to them, the hard disk vendors have to make profits somewhere to pay for the R&D for bigger disks.)

22Tb drives are selling for closer to $500, so 2x is $1000, plus another $100-150 for the case/electronics and you're right around $1,150. So, about a 25%-ish uplift.

It's a lot for most people, mostly because most people don't need 44Tb of at home storage. Personally, I have no need for it as I use cloud storage mostly.

 

[Uncle Al]

Not to worry, give t 12-18 months and it will be half that price .....

 

[Gars]

Always avoid RED link

 

[captaincranky]

$1,500 for 44Tb? Doesn't sound all that bad to me. I used to sell high-end, enterprise storage. 20 years ago, a single RAID storage array would cost 10s of thousands of dollars and provide maybe a couple of TB of usable capacity. It also required a data center to power and cool the devices. 44Tb on your desktop is almost ridiculous.

Well, my first PC was an eMachines, (forget the model #), circa 2005. I was astounded with its 'massive' 160 GB of storage. Prior to that, a floppy drive for the Atari 800, 1200 machines listed around $400.00. Let's face it, then isn't now, those weren't 'the good old days', and it's time to move on past the 'war stories'.

That being said, I start to become apprehensive and queasy around 4 TB. I can't picture committing 22 TB of data to anybody's single electro-mechanical storage device, period. I'm wondering how many of those you would need in a RAID array to feel confident you won't lose any data to a drive failure. I'm thinking multiply the cost per GB by 4, maybe?.

In fact, the only reason I'm out to 4 TB, is because the new $50.00 Seagate single platter 2 TB "Barracudas" fill up too fast, and they're for all intents and purposes, 'the Saturday Night Special', of the HDD world.. They'll brick if you look at them cross eyed.

OTOH, the 160 GB WD SATA 1 'Blue" I took out of the eMachines when I junked it, was still going strong after 13 years of being used every day. Meh, maybe those were the good old days after all.

 

[waclark]

Well, my first PC was an eMachines, (forget the model #), circa 2005. I was astounded with its 'massive' 160 GB of storage. Prior to that, a floppy drive for the Atari 800, 1200 machines listed around $400.00. Let's face it, then isn't now, those weren't 'the good old days', and it's time to move on past the 'war stories'.

That being said, I start to become apprehensive and queasy around 4 TB. I can't picture committing 22 TB of data to anybody's single electro-mechanical storage device, period. I'm wondering how many of those you would need in a RAID array to feel confident you won't lose any data to a drive failure. I'm thinking multiply the cost per GB by 4, maybe?.

In fact, the only reason I'm out to 4 TB, is because the new $50.00 Seagate single platter 2 TB "Barracudas" fill up too fast, and they're for all intents and purposes, 'the Saturday Night Special', of the HDD world.. They'll brick if you look at them cross eyed.

OTOH, the 160 GB WD SATA 1 'Blue" I took out of the eMachines when I junked it, was still going strong after 13 years of being used every day. Meh, maybe those were the good old days after all

I sold storage products for over 2 decades. Just pointing out that $1500 isn’t all that much for that kind of capacity. I certainly wouldn’t store that much critical data on an unprotected drive. I’m would either use RAID 1 or I would use the device as a backup target. Personally I am amazed at that kind of capacity at that price.

 

[captaincranky]

I sold storage products for over 2 decades. Just pointing out that $1500 isn’t all that much for that kind of capacity.

Well, it's sort of disingenuous to advertise these drives at their full capacity. Any user with any common sense knows with single drives of any capacity, need to be backed up. which makes the true price of 44 TB of storage $3,000.00 with these drives.

To be fair external drives tend to be designed with an eye on appearance. You know something that looks "pretty" on the desktop. Here, someone in need of that much storage, perhaps shouldn't be concerned as much for looks, but practicality. I'd be looking at a multi bay NAS device instead instead.

Now comes my "phobia", or skepticism regarding possible relative disadvantage between lithography and machining tolerances. As you know CPUs are "binned". Which amounts to the same chip, using the same materials, etched on the same machine, can yield different results. Which leaves me to wonder if machining tolerances and wear resistance have advanced to the point necessary to guarantee accurate and reliable data retrieval down the road a ways I"ll grant you, that may well be an irrational fear.

As far as "war stories" go, I've told a few in my day. My favorite being, (when the young 'uns were bellyaching about the price of CPUs), was that the Pentium 4 "Extreme Edition", carried a list price of a whopping $999,00.Erstwhile, today's lowly $130.00 i3-12100, would, "rip it a new one".

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/27492/pentium-4-processor-extreme-edition-supporting-ht-technology-3-73-ghz-2m-cache-1066-mhz-fsb.html.

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Intel® Core™ i3-12100 Processor (12M Cache, up to 4.30 GHz) quick reference with specifications, features, and technologies.

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[ChrisH1]

You'll need 3, one for data, one to back it up onto, and one for your off-site backup.

 

[Bp968]

$1,500 for 44Tb? Doesn't sound all that bad to me. I used to sell high-end, enterprise storage. 20 years ago, a single RAID storage array would cost 10s of thousands of dollars and provide maybe a couple of TB of usable capacity. It also required a data center to power and cool the devices. 44Tb on your desktop is almost ridiculous.

Its actually pretty terrible. I only paid slightly more then that for a QNAP 8 bay NAS that I put a 512gb NVMe SSD and 4 18TB enterprise drives inside. So its a RAID10 with 36TB of capacity and more redundancy and more room to grow in the future. if you need more then 8 bays the NAS supports adding a 4 or 8 bay expansion and you can add as many USB external drives as you want. I have 4 external 8TB drives for backing up the array.

I just couldn't trust a single mirror-in-a-box like they sell, especially at that price. Those mybook enclosures always seem to have absolutely terrible airflow and the drives end up running super hot over their shorter then expected lifetimes.

Of course, I also use an older LTO-4 tape backup as well so I might just be the odd one. I wish I could find a LTO-5 or 6 SAS drive for a decent price.