Western Digital's 20TB hard drive is available this month for $680

[Daniel Sims]

Something to look forward to: When Western Digital revealed its 20TB hard drive and new storage architecture earlier this year, it hadn't provided a concrete date or price for general availability. Now the drives appear to be on sale, though for a hefty price tag and still without a precise shipping date.

Western Digital first unveiled its 20TB enterprise-oriented hard drive with new OptiNAND technology at the end of August. OptiNAND uses embedded flash memory to store drive metadata, which Western Digital says allows for more storage and speeds up access to data. The company said it was sampling the new drives to select customers first while planning a wider release later in the year.

Now, the WD Gold 20TB hard drive with OptiNAND is available on Western Digital's online store for around $680. The store page still doesn't give a release date, but it pegs availability at one-to-two weeks. The checkout page also shows shipping as one-to-two weeks. It's unclear if that indicates the date range within which it plans to release the 20TB hard drive or if it has already sold out and new stock won't be in for another couple of weeks. So far, Western Digital hasn't made the 20TB hard drive available at any other retailer. The website also lists a 20TB Ultrastar hard drive but has no details on price or availability.

Seagate already shipped 20TB hard drives using HAMR technology last year. Both companies hope to have 30TB hard drives in the second half of this decade (second-generation HAMR in the case of Seagate), and Seagate plans to get to 100TB by 2030.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/92231-you-can-buy-western-digital-20tb-hard-drive.html

 

[VitalyT]

For this money, you can get a decent 8TB SATA-3 SSD (I did 4 months ago).

And if you think that capacity isn't enough in a PC, then you do not need this 20TB monstrosity anyway, you need a proper NAS, with better and cheaper drives in it.

 

[Gomos]

For this money, you can get a decent 8TB SATA-3 SSD (I did 4 months ago).

And if you think that capacity isn't enough in a PC, then you do not need this 20TB monstrosity anyway, you need a proper NAS, with better and cheaper drives in it.

Which NAS solution is cheaper per TB?

 

[dangh]

For this money, you can get a decent 8TB SATA-3 SSD (I did 4 months ago).

And if you think that capacity isn't enough in a PC, then you do not need this 20TB monstrosity anyway, you need a proper NAS, with better and cheaper drives in it.

I think this drive is clearly nas or db centers oriented.
And I would love to get nas with those 20tb drives.

 

[Avro Arrow]

I'm kinda conflicted about this. It's amazing to have 20TB on one drive but I can get an 8TB drive for $190CAD (~150USD). Sure, it's a bit of a hassle to run several drives but for less than the cost of that 20TB drive, I could have four 8TB drives which equals 32TB of space. That extra 12TB is nothing to sneeze at because it's literally 60% more capacity for LESS money.

The value of this drive is completely dependent on the prospective buyer and their needs.

 

[BadThad]

I look forward to the day when mechanical HDD's are a distant memory like the floppy drive.

 

[dangh]

I'm kinda conflicted about this. It's amazing to have 20TB on one drive but I can get an 8TB drive for $190CAD (~150USD). Sure, it's a bit of a hassle to run several drives but for less than the cost of that 20TB drive, I could have four 8TB drives which equals 32TB of space. That extra 12TB is nothing to sneeze at because it's literally 60% more capacity for LESS money.

The value of this drive is completely dependent on the prospective buyer and their needs.

You're right, but if you have a NAS with 5 bays only, that's a difference between 32 tera and 80 tera os data on a single, small, power efficient device.
If you'd like to have same total space with 8 disks you'd have to have 11 HDD's, much larger and more expensive NAS, much more energy consumption, heat and noise generated, and physical space taken.
Everything depends on your use case, but nearly no one buys such large HDDs for his desktop PC.

 

[Avro Arrow]

You're right, but if you have a NAS with 5 bays only, that's a difference between 32 tera and 80 tera os data on a single, small, power efficient device.
If you'd like to have same total space with 8 disks you'd have to have 11 HDD's, much larger and more expensive NAS, much more energy consumption, heat and noise generated, and physical space taken.
Everything depends on your use case, but nearly no one buys such large HDDs for his desktop PC.

I agree that in a NAS bay, the number of drives makes a huge difference. However, I would TOTALLY put a 20TB drive in my desktop. I actually have more than 20TB of space in it right now.

 

[dangh]

I agree that in a NAS bay, the number of drives makes a huge difference. However, I would TOTALLY put a 20TB drive in my desktop. I actually have more than 20TB of space in it right now.

I would never put a single 20TB in my desktop, only in mirroring too much data to lose

 

[Avro Arrow]

I would never put a single 20TB in my desktop, only in mirroring too much data to lose

Well, in truth, I would only use it as a backup/bulk storage device. My working drives are SSDs. The drive space I listed includes my external backup hard drives. It would sit idle 99% of the time.

 

[0dium]

I look forward to the day when mechanical HDD's are a distant memory like the floppy drive.

Well...for some floppies are not a distant memory

 

[Gomos]

I'm kinda conflicted about this. It's amazing to have 20TB on one drive but I can get an 8TB drive for $190CAD (~150USD). Sure, it's a bit of a hassle to run several drives but for less than the cost of that 20TB drive, I could have four 8TB drives which equals 32TB of space. That extra 12TB is nothing to sneeze at because it's literally 60% more capacity for LESS money.

The value of this drive is completely dependent on the prospective buyer and their needs.

This 20 TB drive should not be the reference. Where I live, HDDs have exactly the same price per GB all the way from 6 TB to 18 TB.

 

[Avro Arrow]

This 20 TB drive should not be the reference. Where I live, HDDs have exactly the same price per GB all the way from 6 TB to 18 TB.

That would be a lot easier to deal with. Around here, the price drops the closer you get to 8TB but then starts to climb when you go beyond that.