Western Digital’s new 6TB portable HDDs mean you never have to delete anything again

Data storage and drive manufacturer Western Digital has taken the wraps off its new 6TB portable hard disc drives (HDDs) that boast the world’s highest capacity for the 2.5in form factor to date.

Whether you’re looking to horde hundreds of thousands of pictures of your kids or pets, your entire digitised cassette collection (because you know Spotify won’t be around when the world ends), or that really big “homework” folder, a couple of these means you’ll never have to delete anything again.

Y’all got any more of them HDDs?

The new 6TB capacity will be available across the company’s WD, WD_BLACK and SanDisk Professional product lineups.

“Expanding our portfolio with the world’s first 2.5″ 6 TB portable hard drive is an incredible technological achievement, and it enables us to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible,” said Nitin Kachhwaha, Director of Product Management at Western Digital, in a press release.

While it sounds like a lot of storage, and it certainly is, these new drives aren’t a whole lot bigger than the previous highest-capacity portable drives. Those, also made by Western Digital, offer 5TB of storage.

To put that into perspective, the new WD 6TB drives can hold roughly 629,145 photos of your fur baby (assuming an average file size of 10MB). That’s a whopping 104,857 more photos than the 5TB drives. Put another way, you can store 277 copies of all 60,678,646 pages of English Wikipedia (without media) on just one drive.

As big as they are, they still can’t hold a candle to ExaDrive’s EDDCT100. This 3.5in SSD offers 100TB of digital storage and only costs $40,000 — about R730,500.

We don’t yet have local prices for WD’s new 6TB 2.5in HDDs but seeing as the 5TB version of the WD My Passport and WD_BLACK drives go for R2,700 and R3,250 respectively, we expect the new ones will probably be slightly more.