WD 20TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black

Product Information

Many years of close collaboration work with our key component suppliers is leading to impactful technology breakthroughs to achieve higher capacities, which ultimately reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) of our nearline HDDs. If you appreciate the gamer aesthetic, the P10 is an obvious choice over more vanilla offerings like the WD My Passport or the Seagate Backup Plus Ultra Touch. Hard disk drives are cheap and offer plenty of capacity but they are bound to disappear in a not-so-distant future. The UltraStar DC HC560 is the only direct competitor for the EXOS 20TB, as Toshiba hasn’t released a 20TB drive yet.

However, the 550TB per year workload isn’t a huge number when you consider how much of that could be taken by drive integrity tests. That converts into a warranty that lasts for five years with a TBW of 2,750TB, compared with the 1,500TBW of the IronWolf Pro. But modern ones are faster, more stylish, and often more durable than their counterparts from a few years ago.It comes formatted in Mac-friendly HFS+, one of two formats (along with APFS) compatible with the macOS Time Machine backup system. At 4TB and up, 256MB of DRAM cache is an option that can help elevate it further over the competing WD Blue HDD. In a rather unexpected move, Western Digital introduced its first dual actuator hard disk drives (HDDs) on Monday, matching its competitor Seagate's impressive Exos drives that use similar tech.

It features 10 platters and uses CMR (conventional magnetic recording) rather than the controversial SMR to reach that capacity. Join the experts who read Tom's Hardware for the inside track on enthusiast PC tech news — and have for over 25 years. The LaCie 2big RAID array promises the reliability and delivers the performance benefit you'd expect from 7,200rpm platters, magnified by the default RAID 0 setting, while the optional RAID 1 setting is available if you want data redundancy.

Slightly rounded edges and ripples give the My Passport drive both the look and the feel of a consumer gadget. Meanwhile, media and the TDMR read heads that Seagate has been using for its 14TB, 16TB, and 18TB HDDs have been in mass production for years, so they are still cheaper than the components used for HAMR drives. It is available with SATA or SAS interfaces and comes with 5-year warranty, 256MB cache and a 7200RPM rotational speed. You will want specialized drives for NAS, surveillance/DVR/NVR, raw storage for media and backups, or for heavier workloads.