With up to 2.5M hours MTBF 3, WD Gold hard drives deliver enhanced levels of dependability and durability. It boasts exceptional read and write speeds; we recorded speeds of 286.8MB/s and 279.3MBps respectively in the 20TB iteration, based on testing via CrystalDiskMark, although This is roughly 10% faster than the previous 18TB drive and is sure to be beaten again by the newly launched 22TB iteration of the zippy HDD. You can still use the HDD for Storage Pools, Volumes, Hot-spares, etc, but it is an oddly jarring message for some. Of course, this is the current compatibility of this HDD at the time of writing and may well change in the future as further HDD capacities arrive and additional compatibility testing takes place. 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.

Beyond sheer size, other factors such as the fastest hard drive and fastest SSD speed, as well as overall performance, play a critical role in our evaluation. Our guide also touches upon the best external hard drive and best portable SSD options available, ensuring that you find a balance between capacity, speed, and portability.

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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. Testing the WD Red Pro 22TB is going to be performed across multiple methods, but still rather unconventional. This drive is designed for deployment in 8+ Bay servers and higher and although I have several NAS in the studio that could accommodate this frequency of drives, I do not have multiple WD Red Pro 22TB units. Therefore the testing I have conducted are all examples of single-drive performance. These will include several PC testing sessions using popular and recommended storage testing applications and two NAS tests involving Synology and QNAP. 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.

WD Gold drives are available in capacities up to 24TB utilizing the OptiNAND technology's capacity-enabling feature. 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. material/labor costs worldwide have spiked also which keeps cost up a but. Ssds have less material overall. 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. Solidigm and its two 30.72TB SSDs: The D5-P5430 (coming later this year) and the D5- P5316 , as well as the 61TB D5-P5336Overall, 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. 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.

WD Gold drives have sophisticated monitoring electronics that help correct linear and rotational vibrations in real time using enhanced vibration protection technology for improved performance in high-vibration environments. 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. We believe the future of archive storage is based on the hard drive. Our mission is to help solve the cold storage/deep archive problem and what that looks like, which may be, perhaps, a slightly different form or capability than today. 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. 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.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. 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.