Storing your digital media in the cloud makes sense. Modern internet is fast enough to make downloading large files a relative breeze, while sparing you from investing in the massive space requirements of keeping movies, shows, and whatever other media files you have in your collection. Of course, there will always be plenty of holdouts. Some people just prefer having local access to their gigantic media collection. The Western Digital My Book Duo 44TB is designed for those folks.
The newest addition to Western Digital’s external drive line, the device gives you a whopping 44TB of storage space that you can hook up to a PC or connect to your local network. Whether you’re a filmmaker who likes to hoard endless hours of original footage, a film buff who likes to keep highest-quality digital copies of your favorite titles, or just a digital archiver who likes to keep files of all sorts for posterity, this thing is exactly the perfect addition to your home setup.
The Western Digital My Book Duo 44TB houses two 22TB drives inside its tower enclosure, allowing you to stash a gigantic load of files locally. That means, you have enough space to store all the movies, photos, videos, game installers, app installers, and whatever other large files you like to keep locally, as well as back up any important things on your machines. It has a default RAID-0 setting for maximum speed and capacity (it’s been optimized specifically for it), with support for RAID-1 in case you prefer using one drive to mirror the other to make sure your data is safe (which halves your storage capacity to 22TB). You can also use the two drives inside separately, which is a good way to make sure a single file isn’t split across the two drives, although you’ll need to install a downloadable software to manage that.
It has 256-bit AES hardware encryption with built-in password protection software, so you can secure any data that you want to keep safe. According to the outfit, it’s fully plug-and-play on Windows 10 and 11 (no word on older versions, but should probably be fine), although you’ll need to download the NTFS driver if you want to use it with a Mac.
The Western Digital My Book Duo 44TB retains the same look as other external drives in the My Book line, so you get the familiar black and gray color scheme with the tower form factor. It measures 7.1 x 3.9 x 6.3 inches (height x width x depth), so it will take up a fair amount of room, requiring you to clear up some desk space to accommodate it. For connectivity, it has a USB-C port for high-speed connection to your PC, although it also has two additional USB-A slots (3.2 and 3.0) in case you want to use it as an accessory or charging hub. It has a 12V AC connection for power (yes, it needs its own power source).
The Western Digital My Book Duo 44TB is available now, priced at $1,499.99.
