Buying an external hard drive for your needs includes figuring out the space needed to store data. You don’t want to get an external hard drive that is too small, and you don’t get enough space to store your data safely. This hard drive comes in a sleek white and silver plastic box that matches nicely with most desk decors. The aesthetics of this drive are impressive. You can choose the device with one or two drives bays for hard disks, and if you choose the bigger two-bay option, you will need to look at the overall dimensions of the product. One surprise was that considering the performance improvements, we had expected the 20TB drive to pull more power and generate more heat. The IronWolf Pro 20TB offers some good incentives to choose it over the 18TB version and smaller capacities in each series that go beyond just being bigger. On that basis, we’d take the Seagate EXOS 20TB and its 550TB/year workload rating and 2.5M-hr MTBF over the IronWolf Pro 20TB.

Seagate will soon offer 20 TB HDDs suitable for Unraid Seagate will soon offer 20 TB HDDs suitable for Unraid

Alongside its IronWolf Pro, Seagate also makes a 20TB EXOS design that we’ll be covering shortly, aimed at the same slice of the Enterprise market that the UltraStar DC HC560 was created.This hard drive offers flexible connectivity with ports available for FireWire 800, USB 3.0, and eSATA. This unit offers two FireWire 800 ports for flexibility through Daisy Chain. It is compatible with Windows and Mac and comes with a 2-year warranty. I would never use 20 TB drives to store my photography, videography, or any work-related files for the reasons listed above. If one of those hard drives was to fail, and I had all my work on it, I would have to wait two days or more, just to be able to find out if everything still was there. Were there two 10 TB hard drives instead of a single 20 TB hard drive and one of them would die, there would be a 50% chance that the file I was looking was still accessible. And if it wasn’t, rebuilding the dead hard drive would only take a day.

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

As hard drive capacity increases, but speeds stay the same, duplicating a single hard drive will become an ever longer lasting process. You could duplicate two 10 TB simultaneously in half the time it takes to do the same with a 20 TB drive. One commenter makes the analogy to a city’s water supply: Picture a city with a massive tower, but only garden hose to get it out. The argument for the use of 20 TB drives The transfer time of this drive depends on your home network setup. The speed isn’t as fast as an external drive connected to a computer, but you get an added benefit to access your files from any device on your network. Oddly, while idle, the 20TB pulls a little more power than the 18TB, 5.5W from 5.2W, but critically when it is running, it uses less power. Down from 8W on the 18TB to 7.7W on the 20TB, its standby power level is also less. Connecting external drives to this unit and managing different settings on this drive is very easy, and you won’t face any issues while setting it up or operating. This drive is available in a different storage configuration, and it is available in 4 TB, 6 TB, 8 TB, 12 TB, 16 TB, and 20 TB storage capacities.

Another advantage that you can get from this drive is it’s USB 3.1 2 nd Gen interface. You can expect faster data transfers due to its x2 Thunderbolt 3 ports. Moreover, it also comes with an HDMI port to offer 4K and HDR video streaming. You can easily store large files like 4K videos at a lightning-fast speed. But, the WD Red Pro 20TB that’s in direct competition with the Seagate IronWolf Pro 20TB is much cheaper, at least at the MSRP level. Higher Reliability: Enterprise-class, with 2M hours MTBF and a 550TB/year workload rate for more than 3× that of standard surveillance HDDs. On paper, 20 TB sound like a fantastic innovation. Using just 20 TB drives, you could have 100 TB of available storage space with just six drives in your Unraid server. But Linus, from the Linus Tech Tips YouTube channel, has a compelling argument against increasing the size of hard drives from where they currently are. When we first saw these numbers, they sounded reasonable because the workload value isn’t like a TBW number on an SSD, as the 300TB is for each year of operation up to five years.