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. 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. The design of the WD Red Pro 22TB Hard drive is quite uniform when compared to the 16TB, 18TB and 20TB versions of the same drive. The green PCB seemed the tiniest pinch thinner and less pronounced in this drive – likely due to every single millimetre counting in efforts to ensure that the drive is still a standard sized 3.5″ class HDD. Indeed, the newest generation of hard drives (i.e ones that use larger numbers of platters and helium sealing) tend to be considerably more solid and industrial in appearance than ever. Overall, the WD Gold 22TB HDDs aren’t trying to break a ton of new ground, they don’t really need to. Data availability is the name of the game for HDDs, but the 22TB Golds do offer a good performance profile as well. The WD Gold 22TB HDDs should find plenty of practicality for any application where data density and availability are the primary factors.

The right choice depends on various factors, including what you intend to store and transfer, and the volume of data involved. Whether you're upgrading your laptop's hard drive or equipping a network-attached storage (NAS) device with a high-speed option, understanding the nuances of different drives is crucial. For performance, HDDs are also often gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is usually a direct indicator of performance. The RPM value impacts sequential transfers as well as random access latency. Lower RPM drives tend to be quieter and more efficient, while higher RPM drives have better performance. There are also variable RPM drives that try to achieve the best of both worlds. Power draw, heat, and noise are factors related to performance. 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

Conclusion

Our next test shifts focus from a pure 8K sequential 100% read/write scenario to a mixed 8K 70/30 workload, which will demonstrate how performance scales in a setting from 2T/2Q up to 16T/16Q. In all tests except max latency, the WD Gold 22TB started off a bit behind the 12TB WD Ultrastar in the initial stages; however, it showed noticeably better-sustained performance when approaching the terminal queue depths. The sides of the WD Red Pro 22TB are quite standard and exactly what you might expect, completely sealed from all sides and feature the usual screw holes. The interface of the drive is a SATA data+power connector that does manage to give you a little perspective about the height of this drive and the density of those contained platters in this 2.61cm high media casing (it pretty much maximizes the full conventionally available space a 3.5″ can suitably occupy in any NAS server bay right now. This SATA port allows the drive to provide a reported maximum performance of 265MB/s Sequential Read (the tiniest pinch lower than the 272MB/s of the 18TB WD Red Pro) which is still remarkably impressive, almost halfway saturating the bandwidth of SATA and closing in on the speeds of early SSD technology in the late 00’s and early teens. 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.

WD Gold lets you build out your storage your way with a full portfolio of SATA HDDs from 1TB to 24TB 1, engineered for heavy application workloads and designed to handle workloads up to 550TB 2 per year.

WD Gold 22TB Advanced Technology

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.

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. 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.

Massive Capacity and Impressive Performance Potential

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. Now, before I move on to the NAS testing. It is worth highlighting a couple of important factors with regard to the WD Red Pro 22TB and the support available from each NAS brand I am focusing on for the testing. Now, Synology is the ONLY NAS brand in the market that also has its own first-party HDDs available to users too. These are Originally Toshiba Enterprise-grade produced hard disks that have had a Synology-specific firmware applied to them. Now, why is this relevant? Well, because some larger-scale Synology products in 2022 onwards do not list other 3rd Party HDDs as compatible. Even then, if you look up some of the older 2020 released NAS drives currently in the market (such as the DS920+ for example), they DO list HDDs from the likes of Western Digital (and their WD Red, Ultrastar and Gold series) BUT they do not list drives larger than 18TB at the time of writing. This is an odd stance by the brand, when larger-scale 20TB and 22TB hard drives are available in the market and designed for NAS. For our standard deviation latency results, the 22TB Gold model hit 0.09ms through 4.97ms (SMB). The 12TB WD Ultrastar fell behind in the terminal queue depths again, posting a range of 0.05ms to 7.22ms. 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