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These last tests are important as not only is the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD designed for NAS use, but also at the time of writing neither brand lists this hard drive as compatible. There is more to this though that I will touch on later. While 30TB HDDs are nearly here, Seagate says that it has also managed to cram 5TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk in the lab, which opens doors to HDDs with capacities of 50TB and higher (assuming that the drives use 10 platters or more). For now, such disks are only used on spinstands, but as the company learns more about them, they will be moved to prototype drives and eventually to commercial HDDs. The right choice depends on various factors, including what you intend to store and transfer, and the volume of data involved. Whether you're upgrading your laptop's hard drive or equipping a network-attached storage (NAS) device with a high-speed option, understanding the nuances of different drives is crucial. It is important to be aware of the drive’s form factor, with 3.5” being the most common for the best HDDs (this is the only type we cover). If you need 2.5”, your options are more limited, especially for capacity. Otherwise, your computer case’s ability to house a certain number of 3.5” drives might be your primary limitation. WD states that OptiNAND drives can secure more than 100MB of write cache data in the event of an unplanned power loss, a 50X improvement over standard drives that can flush about 2MB. Hybrid Drive media is not new, but whereas older generation hybrid drives were more parallel in architecture, this is far more intertwined. It also brings enhancements to the firmware algorithm and system-on-a-chip (SoC). Once again, to be clear, OptiNAND and its iNAND isn’t flash cache (such as the 512MB this drive also features). Rather, it’s a portion of flash memory used to store metadata–or data about existing data–so they can be managed more efficiently.
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. The Seagate 60TB SSD that was launched in 2016. It was a prototype but we don't know whether it was sold. I approached Seagate in May 2023 to find out what happened to it. Improved metadata efficiency is only part of what OptiNAND can provide. Using some of the flash, 128MB, to store data from DRAM during emergency power off (EPO) can improve drive performance without a corresponding risk of data loss. This is the crux of the ArmorCache feature. With ArmorCache and the write cache disabled (WCD), which has no data loss risk by nature, random write IOPS can reach the same level as write cache enabled (WCE) mode on normal drives. At the same time, data is safe from power loss if the drive is used in the WCE mode. This is of significant value for some use cases. The sides of the WD Red Pro 22TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 265MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens.
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Our sequential figures, while at the point of 10GbE saturation for our two links, are also pretty close to what eight HDDs can push out if they are running with 290MB/s each. WD Gold drives have sophisticated monitoring electronics that help correct linear and rotational vibrations in real time using enhanced vibration protection technology for improved performance in high-vibration environments. For our first test, which measures throughput, the WD Gold had a range of 14,333 IOPS to 26,882 IOPS in SMB while 12TB WD Ultrastar posted a range of 16,872 IOPS to 18,789 IOPS.
The WD Gold 22TB is a great addition to the company’s already extensive enterprise hard drive lineup, offering the industry’s highest areal density at 2.2TB per platter (alongside the WD Red for NAS solutions and WD Purple for surveillance setups). The extra 2TB in capacity over the 20TB HDDs certainly adds up if you’re using pallet-fulls of these drives in your data center. The first test involved using AJA. This test was using a 1GB test file (one test using a 1080p format and another being a massive 5K media file test). Unlike previous tests of SSDs here on NASCompares, a 16GB file over a SATA HDD will take quite a while and although it would be interesting to see how the WD Red Pro 22TB drive performs with this sustained largely sequential operation, I left heavy operations to later in the test routines. Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks, as well as widely-published values such as max 4K read and write speed and 8K 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise drives. For performance, we installed eight of these drives in our 36-bay Supermicro Storage SuperServer (configured in SMB) and compared them alongside a set of WD’s 12TB Ultrastar HDDsfor reference. We saw some pretty great throughput across our benchmarking, including 107,303 IOPS in reads and 4,730 IOPS write in random 4K, 109,454 IOPS read, and 105,577 IOPS during our 100% read and write activity at 8K sequential workload, a range of 14,333 IOPS to 26,882 IOPS for our mixed 8K 70/30 workload, and 2.31GB/s in both read and writes.
ArmorCache is the standout enterprise feature.
One common question is, " Is an SSD a hard drive?" While many might call an SSD (Solid State Drive) a hard drive out of habit, an SSD is quite different from a traditional HDD (Hard Disk Drive) with spinning platters in terms of design and performance. Without going too deep into the ' SSD vs HDD' debate, in essense, SSDs offer faster data access and are more durable due to the absence of moving parts, but typically have lower maximum storage capacities than HDDs and are more expensive. For instance, finding an SSD over 8TB can be challenging, while HDDs, while slower, can have capacities of 20TB or even more. The two biggest hard disk drive vendors have released 22TB hard drives with Western Digital unveiling a 26TB model in 2022 (although you won't be able to buy it as it is a data center only product). Toshiba has a 20TB CMR Hard disk drive but no plans for a 22TB one yet.
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