22 Terabytes on a Single Drive! WD My Book External Hard Drive Review

hey everybody it's Lon seidman we're taking a look today at a 22 terabyte external hard drive this is the WD my book it looks a lot like there are other my books but inside is a hard drive with 22 terabytes of capacity we're going to take a closer look at this drive and how it performs in just a second but I do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure this was provided free of charge by WD however they are not paying for this review nor are they reviewing or approving what you're about to see before it was uploaded and all the opinions you're about to hear are my own so let's get into it now and see what you can do with a 22 terabyte hard drive now the price point on this comes in at just under six hundred dollars I would say on a price per terabyte basis there are smaller units are probably a better value than this one but if you need the maximum capacity you can get it here now WD also has a lower cost elements Drive available with the same capacity I suspect that the guts of this elements Drive are the same aim but the differences are that it has a two-year warranty versus a three year on this one and the my book here also comes with a license for acronis backup software along with some encryption features that are not on the elements version now this is a standard USB external hard drive you've got your USB 3 connector here on the back they do give you a USB a cable to pair up with this but if you have a USB type-c computer that you want to plug it into you will need another cable or an adapter to get it connected note that this is running on the Gen 1 standard which maxes out at five gigabits per second out of that Port but due to the performance of a spinning hard drive like this one I don't think you need a faster controller than what's on this device so you're not going to be getting this for its performance it's more about its capacity but we'll talk about its performance in a little bit it does have a power supply that comes with it you can see what it looks like here that will plug into this port so if you are plugging this into an unpowered Hub it won't draw any power from that Hub as it's got its own power supply to get everything up and running and you also have a Kensington lock slot here for locking it down on a desk now this is not going to work Standalone it needs to be plugged into a computer in my testing it worked fine with Windows Mac and Linux and the drive comes formatted with xfat so if you do plug it into your computer and it doesn't work you likely just have to reformat it to a file system that's compatible with your particular operating system now because this has a traditional spinning hard drive inside you will hear it making some noises the spinning of the drive isn't all that loud but I do hear the drive heads move it around quite a bit so it will be of course a little noisier than a solid state drive might be but of course you've got 22 terabytes at your your disposal you can see what it looks like here plugged into my Mac at the moment I haven't put too much on it but I have been writing data back and forth and some of the testing that I've been doing and as you can see here we've got 22 terabytes of storage available to us on the Mac with the x-fat formatting and of course I could format this for something else a little bit later inside it has a SATA 600 drive it looks like an ultra storage drive and I'll show you the internals in a minute and this drive is running at 7200 RPM and earlier on a live stream we ran the Blackmagic disc speed test and I think this test is the best way to measure how this drive will perform in its intended use case which is basically writing large blocks of data back and forth to simulate perhaps backing something up or doing some video archiving or whatever and as you can see here we're getting about 220 megabytes per second on both the rights and the reads which isn't bad actually for a spinning hard drive so if you're doing a big backup this will give you a sense as to how long that backup will take over the USB interface here certainly a little bit quicker than a gigabit Nas might be able to do on your network I also ran the crystal disk Mark test a little earlier and as you can see it does fine on the sequential reads and writes but for the random reads and writes which are the last three rows of that test result it's not so great there so this is not going to be good for booting up operating systems or running games or whatever but again not bad for its intended purpose which is data archiving and backup now you might be wondering with all this capacity would this work well with game consoles well it'll work on a game console but you're not going to be able to get the full capacity out of it because most of the major game consoles only support about eight terabytes or so so you'd be spending a lot of money on capacity that your game console may not be able to access some might allow you to partition the drive into multiple eight terabyte byte sections but I don't believe all of the game consoles out there at the moment allow you to access more than one disk per connection so I would not recommend this for gaming but certainly for backup And archiving and speaking of archiving if you do intend to store your valuable data on this device make sure you've got a backup plan in place and that data is residing more than just inside of here there is a lot of storage density here and these physical drives are very susceptible to physical damage from getting knocked over or falling off the side of a desk or whatever and one thing that I'm disappointed about is that although you've got rubber feet here on the bottom when it's in its vertical orientation there is no anti-slip mechanism here for the horizontal which is actually how I would prefer to use this drive so it doesn't accidentally get tipped over so just be aware of the need to keep a good good backup plan because there's a lot of eggs you're putting in this basket now one popular thing to do amongst us nerds is to shuck the drive out of the external casing so we did experiment with that during my live stream the other day so what you have to do is just stick some spudgers in the bottom there and push it out the good news is you can do this without damaging the drive and inside we found a run-of-the-mill Ultra store WD drive here you can see the part number there and you can also see at the bottom there it's SATA 600 interface so pretty much a standard off-the-shelf Enterprise Drive that's inside of this and the performance as you saw isn't too bad for what it is but again remember all of this data is getting stored on this single point of failure so having good backups here is really important so all together this is just another dumb hard drive that you can plug into your computer but of course the differentiator is the massive storage capacity you have available to you at the upper end of the line but all the drives in the line have the same feature set so if you wanted the encryption and didn't need 22 terabytes the smaller version that cost less of this my book drive will do the trick for you I did not see any performance degradation with the encryption but note that it only works on Windows and Mac because it does require some software to unlock the drive when you plug it in however on Linux and other operating systems you could of course format a partition that has its own encryption supported by the operating system because in the end it is just a dumb hard drive that is going to do it for this look at the WD my book and until next time this is lon seidman thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the lawn.tv supporters including gold level supporters Brian Parker Chris allegreta hot sauce and video games logic kgr Tom Albrecht and I'm the brown if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month [Music] foreign .tv support to learn more and don't forget to 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Channel: Lon.TV

Views: 51,491

Keywords: WD My Book, My Book, 22 TB, large, drive, external drive, USB, USB 3.0, WD, performance, Lon Seidman, Lon Reviews Tech, Lon.TV

Id: rHL0z7gXTxs

Length: 9min 3sec (543 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 18 2023