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

Product Information

LaCie is a company popular for it’s Thunderbolt storage. No other company has offered as many different models with this technology. The LaCie 5Big comes with a traditional pedestal form factor that can fit nicely under a desk. This hard drive uses Marvell hardware RAID technology, and you can align the disks in RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 arrays or go for a simple JBOD configuration. Moreover, users can also configure more than one array in the system.

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

CrystalDiskMark: 286.8MBps (read); 279.3MBps (write) Atto: 277.89MBps (read, 256MB); 274.68MBps (write, 256MB) This design is exclusively a SATA 6GB/s connected drive, and can be used in any PC or NAS that accepts SATA drives of that spec. SkyHawk Health Management: Actively helps protect your surveillance storage by focusing on prevention, intervention, and recovery options. Includes RAID RapidRebuild—providing 3× faster volume rebuilds over traditional RAID rebuilds. It comes with 256MB of cache, a five-year warranty and three years of Rescue Data Recovery Services. MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) is 1.2 million hours, and the yearly workload is 300TB.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. The company’s current largest drive is an 18TB model, which lags behind the 20TB drives currently on offer from Western Digital and Seagate. 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.

Book Duo Desktop RAID External Western Digital WD 20TB My Book Duo Desktop RAID External

If you are reading this review and are already bored with the numbers, we apologise in advance. Because this drive is all about the numbers, the good, bad and ugly. 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.

Customer reviews

Seagate brought its 20TB products to market alongside Western Digital, eliminating any special bragging rights on this scale of drive. Toshiba continues to work closely with the cloud companies to understand their capacity and performance requirements, and the ability to utilize our next-generation technologies will be key to meeting our customers’ needs,” said Ragfhu Gururangan, VP Engineering and Product Marketing at Toshiba America.

Seagate confirms 20TB HAMR hard disk drives have been shipped Seagate confirms 20TB HAMR hard disk drives have been shipped

And while disk drive capacities are increasing, they can't match the exponential growth seen in competing media. The largest SSD right now is a 100TB model from Nimbus Data, while a prototype of a 580TB tape was unveiled only a few days ago. Higher Reliability: Enterprise-class, with 2M hours MTBF and a 550TB/year workload rate for more than 3× that of standard surveillance HDDs.

While better headline speed is always welcome, not having your RAID array eat itself is a much bigger deal. And in the current market, data centre mechanisms can offer greater yearly workloads and almost identical performance for a very similar price.