Can anybody tell me whether a WD ELEMENTS 22TB drive (WDBWLG0220HBK-EESN) uses CMR or SMR?
I contacted WD support and the call handler said he had no information about this (really???). Given the internet is awash with dissatisfied customer bemoaning WD’s less than transparent practices around the technology used in its products, I would rather know up front than finding out after I’ve transferred 22TB of data onto a drive that I’ve got a plum which crawls along when having to overwrite data.
Unless you know the model of the internal hard drive, it would be hard to tell.
Having said that, if you look at the 22TB internal hard drives from WD, and assume WD uses their own drives in their Elements, the only drives with 22TB capacity are CMR.
WD Elements 22TB uses CMR not SMR. It is based on enterprise grade helium drives so you will not face slow speeds during overwriting or large data transfers. Safe to fully use all 22TB on Windows 11 without any performance drop.
