Western Digital starts selling 44TB external hard drives for $1,100

Western Digital today announced the release of higher capacity versions of its My Book hard drives and My Book Duo 2-drive external hard drives. The new 22TB and 44TB capacity offerings represent some of the largest consumer offerings the company has ever offered.

Aimed at people who want more features and prioritize price per GB over speed, the new external storage devices consist of one (in the case of the 22TB My Book) or two (My Book Duo) 3.5″drives. Western Digital’s announcement today says the 22TB My Book is its “highest-capacity consumer drive ever,”but as noted by Tom’s Hardware, the company has begun selling 22TB Network Attached Drives (NAS) ( suggested retail price of $400 per time of writing) in July. But with the My Book line offering components neatly packaged in a case and ready to be used on a desk as backup storage, this series has a broader appeal.

My Book Duo, which Western Digital has already sold in capacities ranging from 16TB to 36TB, also adds ports to your setup. It has a USB-C port that supports speeds up to 5Gbps to connect to systems and also gives you two USB-A ports.

The 44TB option comes in a RAID 0 configuration for maximum speed. However, if you prefer to use a RAID 1 configuration for redundancy or want your system to treat the storage device as two separate drives, My Book Duo supports both via software.

It’s no secret that hard drives have given way to Solid State Drives (SSDs) in recent years due to the faster speeds and durability of SSDs. But if you need a lot of storage space and don’t want to spend a lot of money, hard drives remain a viable option. However, since their mechanical parts wear out faster than SSDs and are prone to data loss from accidental drops, it would make sense to use HDDs as a secondary option where data is also stored elsewhere.

Western Digital My Book drives work with Windows 10 and later, and through the NTFS driver with macOS 11 and later, allowing you to work with Microsoft and Apple operating systems without reformatting.

While hard drives are cheaper on the wallet than SSDs, Western Digital’s My Book line doesn’t give you the most GB per dollar. For a quick comparison, the 22TB My Book has a MSRP of $600, but you can get a 22TB NAS hard drive (regular magnetic recording) from the same company for $500. Western Digital has also begun selling a $550 22TB Elements external hard drive, but it lacks some features compared to the My Book, such as backup software, password protection, and USB-C, and requires reformatting for macOS.

Meanwhile, the 44TB My Book Duo sells for a suggested retail price of $1,100. While you can get a full-fledged premium laptop for this price, the drive is still much more spacious and affordable than an external SSD. Western Digital’s largest external SSD for professional use has a maximum capacity of 32TB and an incredible MSRP of $7,500.