Western Digital is one of the most trusted names in storage. It makes some of the absolute best SSDs for gaming on the market and has a strong range of NVMe, External SSDs, and HDD devices. Back in February, I received a press release telling me that WD would be releasing its largest-ever capacity HDD for consumers.
Immediately becoming the highest capacity drive WD has ever produced, the new My Book Duo Desktop Hard Drive has a sickening 44TB capacity. The 22TB My Book, which we deem to be up there with the best external hard drives on the market, was launched back in July of 2022, but this is quite the leap forward.
I have to admit, a press release with a fully caps-locked title will catch my eye on a bad day, but this one was quite something: "WESTERN DIGITAL BRINGS MILESTONE CAPACITY TO EVERYDAY CONSUMERS AS DATA CREATION CONTINUES TO SOAR".
I was intrigued. Not only would they be expanding the size of their already gargantuan 22TB drive, but they would be doubling it.
The press release continued, with quotes from the research vice president at Global DataSphere at International Data Corporation, John Rydning, who said “While many people rely on the cloud, we know consumers are looking for local storage at their fingertips to help them preserve and readily control their growing amount of personal and business data.”
He has a point. I can't tell you the number of times Google has sent me a very urgent-seeming email to inform me I'm running out of space on my personal account. Years and years of phone photos, emails, files, and downloads rack up some serious space, after all.
“With multiple devices used in our everyday life, we have the ability to instantly create, consume and generate massive amounts of content,” said Susan Park, Vice President of product management at WD. "Our goal is to help people easily and reliably store it all."
In fairness, she is absolutely right. But still, I can't help but find this hilarious. I can only applaud WD for creating something which I'm sure must have been pitched in a product meeting and immediately met with a couple of rye smiles and nods of approval. 44TB is a terrifying prospect!
"Think of the number of games you could fit on that", I said to one of my colleagues. "That's probably the entire Game Pass library", they responded.
Being the editor in charge of all things storage at GamesRadar, my interest was well and truly piqued. Here I was thinking 2023 could bring about the death of HDD storage. So, I decided to find out just how many games 44TB would really hold.
I took to Google. "How many GB is the entire Game Pass library", I searched.
No luck.
The last time someone properly added up the gigabytes was back in 2019, and Game Pass has grown exponentially since then.
So, to the official Xbox Game Pass website I went. Surely they had it on record somewhere?
Nothing. No "required storage for installation" specifications on each game's retail page. Indeed, if I was going to find the answers I wanted, I would have to get my hands dirty. I've got a journalism degree, this could be my Woodward and Bernstein moment, I thought, comically.
So here we are, what feels like years later. I scoured the internet to search through every game on Xbox Game Pass (at this specific time of writing) to find each one's required installation space. I added it all up (all 460 titles that are listed), and found that altogether, the library only comes to a measly 10.289 Terrabytes.
That means the following. If you were to purchase one of WD's 44TB My Book Duos for $1,499.99 at Amazon, and spent probably a month downloading everything - you could fit the entire Xbox Game Pass Library on it and you'd still only have used up about a quarter of its space. Even the 22TB model could fit the library more than once.
Essentially, nobody at all, not even the deepest data miners, not the biggest hoarders of digital games, could ever possibly need that much storage space. But I have to admit, it's the only storage device you'd maybe ever need to be set for life. For now, I'll make do with a couple of 1TB drives at a time.
Don't quite need 44TB for your console games? Take a look at the best PS5 SSDs, the best PS5 external hard drives, or the best Xbox Series X external hard drives.
