Have you ever felt that no matter how large your storage space is, it is never enough? Gone are the times when people would talk about Gigabytes. With our storage needs drastically increasing, we are now into Terabytes.
Talking about Terabytes, we have the perfect HDD in mind for all your storage needs so you will never have to decide which files to keep or which ones to delete. Here comes Western Digital with its 22 TB of HDD as our savior. It seems like this one will take the lead in the market as it comes as a single-drive solution for retail. Starting from its Ultrastar DC HC570 HDD for servers, the capacity limits have now been expanded to other product lines which include the Purple Pro (surveillance), Gold (enterprise), and Red Pro (NAS boxes).
In the words of Ravi Pendekanti, the company’s senior vice president of product management and marketing, HDD Business Unit, “We are thrilled to reach this milestone as HDDs are complex and sophisticated systems. 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.”
There are four helium-filled drive lines and all have been designed using a similar makeup using the OptiNAND technology along with energy-assisted PRM (ePRM). There is a triple-stage actuator which stacks 2.2TB platters. They all have the same form factor of 3.5 inches and a SATA interface with speeds of 6 Gbps. There is a hefty cache of 512 MB and a spindle speed of 7200.
The 22TB Red Pro and Purple Pro are both retail models and will deliver a maximum of the sustained data rate of 265MB/s, whereas the Gold model offers up to 291MB/s. The durability for all models is unmatchable to anything we have seen in the market; the Gold and Purple Pro models have a mean time before failure (MTBF) rating of 2.5 million hours and 1 million hours for Red Pro. All three models are retailing for 599.99 USD.