I recently had the chance to take a look at a massive 22 terabyte WD My Book external hard drive. You can watch my full video review here.
This particular model is priced at just under $600, making it a bit less cost-effective on a per terabyte basis vs. smaller capacity versions. But if you need this much capacity in a single drive you’ll find it here.
The My Book series comes with a three-year warranty, a license for Acronis backup software, and encryption features. You’ll also find the same capacity and guts in their more affordable Elements line that has a shorter two year warranty and lacks the encryption and backup software.
The MyBook uses an aging USB 3 Gen 1 interface and comes with a USB-A cable. It’s compatible with USB-C but you’ll need to purchase a separate adapter or cable to interface the drive.
It’s equipped with a SATA 600, 7200 RPM drive inside, and during testing, it achieved around 220 MB/s for both reading and writing large blocks of data, making it suited for backups and archiving. Its random reads and writes were a big sluggish making this not ideal for gaming or booting operating systems.
While it’ll work with game consoles most will not be able to make use of its full capacity so a smaller drive would be a better choice.
If you plan on using this for storing your priceless data, make sure you have a solid backup plan in place as mechanical drives with this much storage density are susceptible to damage from bumps and drops.
Overall if you needed a lot of capacity in a relatively portable package this will certainly get the job done. Just make sure you have a good backup strategy as you’ll be putting a lot of eggs in one basket here.