Western Digital (WD) has released new additions to its My Book range of bulky, mains-powered external hard disk drives (HDDS), including what it claims to be, “its highest capacity consumer drive ever”.
In a press release, the company announced the 22TB My Book ($599.99 USD / £594.99), tipping it as a means to backup the contents of personal devices in a content-rich, connected world.
It may be WD’s largest external drive to date, but those looking for an internal hard disk drive for network-attached storage (NAS) have had the option of a 22TB 3.5” WD Red Pro for a while.
New WD My Books
What WD gets right, however, is the pressing need for increased data capacity in home and business settings.
"Consumers continue generating data at a rapid pace. In 2022 alone, the average household worldwide generated more than 20TB of data and we expect this number to continue to rise," said John Rydning, research vice president of Global DataSphere at global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
"While many people rely on the cloud, we know consumers are looking for local storage at their fingertips to help them preserve and readily control their growing amount of personal and business data."
No matter the size, those in the market for local storage for a small business server may be a little apprehensive about investing in just the one backup drive.
To that end, the My Book Duo is now also available in a 22TB configuration ($1499.99 USD/£1487.99) and offers two drives in one enclosure.
This provides options for using the drives separately (via a JBOD configuration, offering 44TB of storage in total) or with one as redundancy for the other (via a RAID-1 configuration) for a truly reliable data backup solution.
While the higher-capacity My Books aren’t cheap, they could be a valuable addition to a business tech stack as a long-term investment in on-premise storage that would also cut cloud costs.
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