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In a rather unexpected move, Western Digital introduced its first dual actuator hard disk drives (HDDs) on Monday, matching its competitor Seagate's impressive Exos drives that use similar tech. Seagate® Exos® X20-schijven zijn gebouwd op het platform waarvan wereldwijd miljoenen exemplaren zijn verkocht en geïmplementeerd in oplossingen van toonaangevende cloudserviceproviders. And they boast some exciting traits: not least being filled with helium to protect tiny components inside that can become damaged by atmospheric turbulence. For those that use SAS to connect arrays to multiple servers for fail-over functionality, this might be another reason for going with the EXOS, as it doubles the potential pathways from one to two on each drive. Because there is no spinning platter or moving magnetic head, if you bump the SSD while you're accessing its data, there is no risk that your files will become corrupted and unreadable.
External hard disk drives of similar capacities sell for a bit more, a far cry from a few years ago when they were selling for much less, which is paradoxical given that they cost more to build. As a bonus, a desktop drive that supports Thunderbolt might also come with additional DisplayPort and USB connections that allow you to use the drive box as a hub for your keyboard, mouse, monitor, and other peripherals. When your running 30+ TB data sets that need backing up or recovering those file transfers can literally take days. If your business requires storing large files (or just lots of them), WD's Gold series stretches to a massive 12TB.We changed everything with HelioSeal in 2013; were first to ship energy-assisted HDDs in volume in 2019; and now we’re going to lead again with OptiNAND technology. For performance, HDDs are also often gauged by rotations per minute (RPM), which is usually a direct indicator of performance. Over the years, I have reviewed iPad and iPhone science apps, plus the occasional camera, laptop, keyboard, and mouse. Now, they need "Built in RAID 0" at the controller level to make it easily useable for every day consumers. The ubiquitous SATA interface is used for desktop PCs, and most motherboards have ample available ports, which makes expansion easy.
It comes formatted in Mac-friendly HFS+, one of two formats (along with APFS) compatible with the macOS Time Machine backup system. In an era when gigabytes of cloud storage cost a mere few dollars per month, and trim, slim external SSDs are getting cheaper, external hard drives, based on spinning platter disks, might appear less essential than they once were. Western Digital does not disclose the pricing of its dual actuator HDDs, but they will naturally be more expensive than single-actuator hard drives.
At 4TB and up, 256MB of DRAM cache is an option that can help elevate it further over the competing WD Blue HDD. When deliberating about what product will make it to the list, there’s a number of assumptions we need to make. This makes it a great pick for surveillance and NVR work, but WD’s Purple Pro is quite similar with twice the cache at this capacity.
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