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. 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.

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. 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. 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 new 22TB CMR/PMR and 24TB SMR HDDs will serve as the company's top-of-the-line workhorses that will replace 20TB CMR/PMR and 22TB SMR hard drives from this position.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.

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 uncompetitive (only three manufacturers globally) HDD market is doing what the GPU market is. Old capacities are keeping their prices years after release and newer higher capacities are pushing prices ever higher. 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.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. Our 20TB product features 2TB per disk capacities and we have started to ramp the volume of 22TB products deployed on 2.2TB per disk capacities," said Mosley. "The 20+ TB platform is based on traditional PMR technology and some customers are choosing to enable SMR technology as an additional feature that slightly increases the drives capacity for certain applications. [… ] We are executing plans to deliver another 10% gain in per disk capacity for this PMR platform to offer drives in the mid- to upper 20TB range." First Loss in Years

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. While 30TB HDDs are nearly here, Seagate says that it has also managed to cram 5TB of data on a single 3.5-inch disk in the lab, which opens doors to HDDs with capacities of 50TB and higher (assuming that the drives use 10 platters or more). For now, such disks are only used on spinstands, but as the company learns more about them, they will be moved to prototype drives and eventually to commercial HDDs. 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.For our first test, which measures throughput, the WD Gold had a range of 14,333 IOPS to 26,882 IOPS in SMB while 12TB WD Ultrastar posted a range of 16,872 IOPS to 18,789 IOPS. 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

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.The most common use for hard drives, though, is simple file transfers. Our DiskBench test estimates transfer performance with a real-world workload that is useful for calculating how long a transfer could take. Hard drives have consistent performance and will hit their maximum sustained speed at QD1 with large enough I/O, which is illustrated in our ATTO benchmark results. This is particularly useful for showing differences in technology and capacity as drives get bigger and faster. 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.