The company's publicly available roadmap indicates that Seagate intends to deliver 50+ TB hard drives in calendar 2026, so the HDD maker has plenty of time to polish off its 50TB media for mass production. 22TB and 24TB HDDs Due Shortly The WD Gold 22TB features the same 2.5-million-hour MTBF rating as the other higher capacity models as well as vibration protection technology and a low power draw due to HelioSeal technology. As far as power management goes, the 22TB model has a slightly higher average operational draw at 7.1W compared to the 20TB model; however, its idling is an improved 5.7W.

Most systems default to WCE, which can increase host/software overhead if there’s a need to ensure data integrity, and the risk of critical data loss is a significant factor to consider as well. While only 128MB of iNAND is reserved for power loss metadata, user data in DRAM is also protected as it can be written to flash during sudden power loss with the use of the remaining rotational energy of the spinning disks. ArmorCache can also be disabled in WCE mode for specific environments if desired. 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.While many think that SSDs are the better storage option, HDDs still have a lot of life left and truth be told, power the cloud. Tossing 100 of these drives in a JBOD for instance will show some pretty impressive performance (roughly 30GB/s). As a result, the WD Gold 22TB HDDs are ideal for MSPs, cloud providers, and enterprises that need to have a massive amount of data conveniently available. 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. 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. 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.

Our first throughput test measures 4K random performance. Here, the WD Gold 22TB posted 107,303 IOPS in reads and 4,730 IOPS write (SMB). In comparison, the 12TB WD Ultrastar was able to reach 107,884 IOPS read and 5,600 IOPS write. And here is how the WD Red Pro 22TB sounds when the HDD is being HEAVILY accessed. using a benchmarking tool and extensive random 4K IOPS in read/write testing. Note, the higher the frequency of files, the noisier it will be, as the actuator inside will be working considerably hardware to allocate the small size/high frequency of data to the platters): 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. 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.Moving on to the max latency, the WD Gold recorded just 9.539ms read and 153ms write. In comparison, we saw the 12TB WD Ultrastar hit 403.113ms read and 114ms write.

Nevertheless, you can still push through this warning and proceed to testing the performance of the WD Red Pro 22TB HDD from within the Synology Storage Manager. Here was the results. 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. WD’s unique OptiNAND-enabled ArmorCache technology combines the performance of write cache enabled mode with the data protection of write cache disabled mode without having to compromise by choosing between the two. Our 20TB product features 2TB per disk capacities and we have started to ramp the volume of 22TB products deployed on 2.2TB per disk capacities," said Mosley. "The 20+ TB platform is based on traditional PMR technology and some customers are choosing to enable SMR technology as an additional feature that slightly increases the drives capacity for certain applications. [… ] We are executing plans to deliver another 10% gain in per disk capacity for this PMR platform to offer drives in the mid- to upper 20TB range." First Loss in YearsThe hardware architecture of the WD Red Pro 22TB NAS hard drive is a combination of everything that we have seen in previous revisions of this long-running drive media series, combined with a new method of drive and data metadata management. This drive errs away from the energy-assisted magnetic recording of the Ultrastar 22TB released earlier in 2022, instead managing to provide this herculean 20 terabytes of storage via traditional conventional magnetic recording. It does this with data being split across TEN 2.2TB platters internally, spinning 7200RPM and with 512MB of onboard cache for buffering. The Pro moniker in the model ID is based on portfolio separation in the WD Red series (featuring WD Red, WD Red Plus and WD Red Pro) with this new 22TB NAS HDD being heavily aimed at a larger scale business use. This architecture (along with the noise and vibration protection being handled by 3D Active Balance and geared with the NASWare 3.0 firmware) allows a 300TB per year workload rating, (data center class is 550TB), a 1 million hours MTBF rating and the brand including a 5-year warranty with the drive. Below is a greater breakdown of the WD Red Pro 22TB specifications: Model Number 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. While HAMR will enable rapid growth for Seagate's HDD capacities in the coming years, the company continues to refine its hard drives featuring perpendicular/conventional magnetic recording (CMR/PMR) and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technologies. Either in Q1 or Q2 the company will release its 10-platter CMR/PMR HDDs with 2.2TB disks and a 22TB capacity. SMR version of such drives will further increase capacity to 24TB for those willing to use shingled magnetic recording. With average latency at 8K 70/30, the 22TB Gold model saw great overall results again; it posted 0.27ms through 9.51ms in SMB, while the 12TB Ultrastar recorded a range of 0.23ms through 13.62ms. Formerly FreeNAS, TrueNAS CORE (which is what we used for our WD Gold 22TB Supermicro configuration) is the comprehensive storage OS that allows users to build professional-grade storage systems themselves. As a result, you can a TrueNAS-powered server in a range of data-intensive use cases without having to worry about software costs. All you need to do is install it onto the server (or a VM) and you’re all set.

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. While Seagate's product roadmap for the rest of the year looks extremely promising, the company's quarter ended on December 30, 2022, is nothing but depressing as the company reported its first loss in years. If you install an HDD or SSD inside a Synology system with the latest version of their software platform DSM, but the HDD in question is not on the compatibility list, you are greeted by a message that will detail that the drive is not recommended in the storage manager.Our next benchmark subjects the drives to 100% read and write activity at 8K sequential throughput. Here, the 22TB WD Gold drive posted 109,454 IOPS read and 105,577 IOPS write in SMB, while the WD Ultrastar hit 108,655 IOPS read and 104,077 IOPS write in iSCSI. 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. The new 22TB CMR/PMR and 24TB SMR HDDs will serve as the company's top-of-the-line workhorses that will replace 20TB CMR/PMR and 22TB SMR hard drives from this position. 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. Moving on to max latency numbers, the 22TB WD Gold had a range of 10ms to 40.2ms while the 12TB WD Ultrastar showed 10.01ms through 87.95ms.