WD Unveils Top-Capacity My Book External Drives with Up to 44TB of Storage Space

If you're into desktop external hard drives, you must be familiar with WD's My Book family, whose design has remained the same since October 2016.

The unchanged design is a good thing since an external drive is basically an internal hard drive housed inside a permanent enclosure that connects to a host via a peripheral standard, which, in the My Book's case, is USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps), formerly USB 3.0. There's no need to complicate that simple concept.

And today, the storage vendor released the latest editions of the familiar lineup using its highest-capacity consumer-grade internal hard drives, the 22TB My Book Desktop Hard Drive and the 44TB My Book Duo.

More is generally better when it comes to storage space, but in the case of the new devices, we're talking about a level that's quite over the top.

New WD My Book external drives: Approaching the point of diminishing returns

Twenty-two terabytes is a lot of storage space.

To put things in perspective, most computers come with 1TB or less. So the new 22TB My Book Desktop Hard Drive can be the backup destination for several high-capacity devices and still has some space to spare. (That's if you don't mind moving it from one device to another.)

And more can also be problematic, too. Two reasons.

First, it's the speed. It'd take around two days of continuous copying to fill the new drive up if you indeed have 22TB of precious data.

That's because an external storage device's throughputs generally remain the same regardless of its internal drive's capacity. And hard drives are slow.

Internal hard drives use SATA 2, which caps at 6Gbps, but generally has a real-world sustained speed of around 150MB/s at best. Typically, computers and mobile devices use solid-state drives (SSDs) that are many times faster.

And second, it's the risk of losing a lot of data. The larger the drive, the more it can store, which means the more you will lose if the drive fails. And hard drives can be fragile. Imagine if you have to recover 22TB of data.

So using the new My Book Desktop Hard Drive can be like putting all the eggs in one gigantic basket. The point is that you shouldn't use it—or any single drive—to hold the only copy of important data.

	WD My Book Duo	WD My Book
Capacities and Models	44TB WDBFBE0440JBK 36TB WDBFBE0360JBK 28TB WDBFBE0280JBK 24TB WDBFBE0240JBK 20TB WDBFBE0200JBK 16TB WDBFBE0160JBK	22TB WDBBGB0220HBK 18TB WDBBGB0180HBK 16TB WDBBGB0160HBK 14TB WDBBGB0140HBK 12TB WDBBGB0120HBK 8TB WDBBGB0080HBK 6TB WDBBGB0060HBK 4TB WDBBGB0040HBK
RAID Supports	RAID 0 (default) RAID 1 JBOB	None
Interface	USB-C	USB-SuperSpeed
USB Standard	USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) USB 2.0 compatible	USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps) USB 2.0 compatible
USB Hub	Yes 2x USB-A ports	No
Cables Included	USB-C, USB-C-to-USB-A	USB-A
Dimensions (LWH)	6.30 x 3.94 x 7.09 in (160 x100 x 180 mm)	5.5 x 1.9 in x 6.7 in (139.3 x 49 x 170.6 mm)
Weight	44TB/36TB/28TB: 5.80 lbs (2.63 kg) 24TB: 5.67 lbs (2.57 kg) 20TB: 5.62 lbs (2.55 kg) 16TB: 5.58 lbs (2.53 kg)	22TB/18TB/16TB/14TB: 2.20 lbs (1 kg) 12TB: 2.14 lbs (0.97 kg) 8TB: 2.12 lbs (0.96 kg) 6TB: 2.31 lb (1.05 kg) 4TB: 2.21 lbs (1 kg)
Security	256-bit AES hardware encryption	256-bit AES hardware encryption
Warranty	3 years	3 years

And overcoming those shortcomings, to an extent, is the job of the 44TB My Book Duo.

This one has two 22TB internal hard drives inside that can work in tandem in a RAID 0 (default) or RAID 1 volume to deliver much faster performance or redundancy, respectively.

Still, it can be awkward to use storage devices this large as direct attached storage. Generally, with hard drives of these capacities, it's best to use them in a NAS server which can serve multiple devices in a network simultaneously.

On the other hand, you don't need to necessarily fill up a hard drive's capacity or copy all of its data in one sitting. So, it never hurts to have external drives of huge storage spaces, either.

That is until you learn about the costs of the new My Books.

Availability and pricing

WD says the new 22TB My Book Desktop Hard Drive and 44TB My Book Duo is available now for the suggested retail prices of $599.99 and $1499.99, respectively. That's a lot of money for simple extra storage, even a lot of it.

I'd recommend using that fund to get a 4-bay NAS to sever, such as the Synology DS923+, and fill it with lower-capacity drives. Or you can get one of the lesser capacities of the My Books that fit your needs and budget better.