It is rumoured that by the end of the year, Toshiba will reveal a 10-platter 26TB drive based on microwave-assisted switching (MAS-MAMR) technology, to be then followed by an 11-platter 30TB model next year. Thunderbolt ports, should you need to daisy-chain storage, devices and display. This is particularly useful at the high end of the market where creative professionals are particularly fond of this port Where the IronWolf Pro 20TB offered an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is 1.2 million hours, and the yearly workload is 300TB. The EXOS 20TB exceeds those levels with a 2.5-million-hour MTBF rating and 550TB annual workload. Solidigm and its two 30.72TB SSDs: The D5-P5430 (coming later this year) and the D5- P5316 , as well as the 61TB D5-P5336 WD sales literature will tell you this stores 150 games, but game sizes vary widely. The firm puts the average size per game at 36GB while some reviewers claim it's 80GB nowadays. In any case, it's a lot of storage to expand your gaming system.

Perhaps the only thing you don't need to pay all that much attention to is the warranty. Sounds counter-intuitive, perhaps? Sure, a long warranty is nice. But if your drive breaks because you dropped it, the warranty likely won't cover that, anyway. Even if the drive fails because of a manufacturing defect, most warranties simply replace the drive and don't cover the cost of recovery services that attempt to rescue your data from the broken drive. The real value lies in what's on your drive, not the drive itself. CrystalDiskMark: 289.07MBps (read); 295.75MBps (write) Atto: 281.32MBps (read, 256MB);275.27MBps (write, 256MB)

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Also know that you can find external drives that do way more than just store your data. Some include SD card readers to offload footage from a camera or drone in the field, while a few specialized models have built-in Wi-Fi and can double as a little media server, able to connect to more than one device at a time. Doing the same calculations that we did for the IronWolf Pro, taking the 2750TB limit over five years and dividing that by the capacity, we end up with total bytes transferred of 137.5 TB per TB of drive capacity. Details about the extent of our regulation by the Financial Conduct Authority are available from us on request. The WD Elements™ Desktop Hard Drive works right out of the box with Windows ® PCs – just plug into the USB port to instantly add storage.

That’s still not amazing compared with an unbranded NAND SSD, though it’s much better than the 75TB of workload transfer that the IronWolf Pro offers. If you want to have a PCIe drive instead, expect to pay a significant premium although the difference in speed will be one magnitude higher thanks to the use of PCIe Gen 4 protocol. Other 8TB SSDs includeDesktop hard drives are cheaper per Terabyte, offer capacities above 20TB, usually perform better but they are much larger and require an external power supply unit. This is all music to the ears of those that service and maintain data centre arrays since the possibility of drives failing and sending the array critical aren’t scenarios that they like. Both could read and write at close to 285MB/s in most tests, a 10% improvement that can be linked directly to the extra platter and heads that this drive has over the 18TB model. For the customer, the choice is between the biggest drives available, allowing the largest possible arrays, or spreading the workload between less expensive drives with potentially increased levels of redundancy.

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. Available with a SATA or SAS interface, it offers an unlimited drive write per day for five years (the length of the warranty) thanks partly to the use of SLC technology (which explains the price as well). A cheaper version of the Exadrive, the EDNLT064, is also available and is the second largest solid state drive on the market with a capacity of 64TB but swaps TLC for QLC.The drive comes preloaded with Buffalo's "ModeChanger" utility for Windows and Mac that switches it from Open to Secure and vice-versa. Mode switching takes less than a minute and the drive must be reformatted after that.