Western Digital Introduces 6 TB WD Red Hard Drive

[Cristian_25H]

WD, a Western Digital company, and world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning WD Red line of SATA hard drives for home and small office NAS (network attached storage) systems with the release of a 5 TB and first-to-market 6 TB capacity for NAS-specific storage and the introduction of WD Red Pro hard drives that address the medium to large business NAS market. Compatibility-tested with top NAS system manufacturers and optimized for power and performance, WD Red 3.5-inch hard drives are now shipping in 1 TB to 6 TB capacities; and the new WD Red Pro 3.5-inch hard drives are available in 2 TB to 4 TB capacities.

"With the expansion and evolution of the WD Red family, WD once again is providing its loyal customers with increased capacity up to 6 TB; improved bay count support with up to 8 bays; increased product breadth with WD Red Pro; and more features with the latest generation of NASware technology," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, WD Storage Technology. "WD continues to listen to its customers and bring exciting innovation to the category they helped to create."





WD Red
A storage industry innovation first introduced in 2012, WD Red hard drives address the unique environment of NAS and the growing demand for affordable, reliable and compatible storage that reduces customer total cost of ownership. With the release of 5 TB and 6 TB models, the WD Red line of hard drives is now further enriched with greater storage capacity and increased performance with NASware 3.0, an enhanced version of WD's original NASware technology, designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce customer downtime and to simplify the integration process.

WD Red hard drives also feature 3D Active Balance Plus, an enhanced balance control technology, which significantly improves overall drive performance and reliability. Exclusive for WD Red customers, WD offers free premium 24x7 dedicated support.

By increasing NASware 3.0 capability, the WD Red 1-6 TB capacity drives are capable of supporting up to eight bay NAS systems with no negative impact to performance.

WD Red Pro
Ideal for medium to large business environments, the new WD Red Pro line of NAS hard drives supports eight to 16 bay NAS systems. The enhanced design offers reliable, high performance storage powered by NASware 3.0. By introducing the WD Red Pro, WD now has a full portfolio NAS storage solution with the WD Red family (WD Red and WD Red Pro) for both consumer and business NAS solutions.

WD Green
The WD Green line of cool and quiet hard drives is also seeing capacity expansion with 5 TB and 6 TB additions for high capacity consumer storage.

High capacity WD 6 TB hard drives will integrate seamlessly with WD's My Cloud, My Cloud EX2, My Cloud EX4, My Cloud Mirror personal cloud storage as well as My Book and My Book Duo external drive solutions and are compatible to work with a wide array of WD OEM NAS partners. An updated list of WD Red-qualified products and manufacturers is available on the WD website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=810.

Availability and Pricing
Available now at select U.S. retailers and distributors, WD Red and WD Red Pro have three- and five-year limited regional warranties, respectively. Manufacturer's suggested retail price (MSRP) for WD Red 5 TB (model #: WD50EFRX) is $249.00 USD, and $299.00 USD for 6 TB (model #: WD60EFRX). Pricing for WD Red Pro 2 TB (model #: WD2001FFSX) is $159.00 USD, $199.00 USD for 3 TB (model #: WD3001FFSX) and $259.00 USD for 4 TB (model #: WD4001FFSX). More information about WD Red hard drives including terms of the limited warranty may be found on the company website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/nas/.

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[Drmark]

Good to see those retail prices, finally the 6's will drop a lot... "I hope."

 

[The Von Matrices]

It's good to see that the cheap(er) 1TB SSDs are finally lighting a fire under the HDD makers to make larger disks. I hate having to use 12 disks in a RAID 60 simply because HDD capacity increases have slowed to a crawl in the past 5 years. I would much rather have fewer disks.

I think the HDD makers were hoping that SSHDs would catch on to improve their revenue (which is why we were stuck at 3TB/4TB for so long). Since SSHDs have essentially failed in the market, the manufacturers are now aware that their main selling point has to be capacity.

I'm also unclear as to what the difference between a Red and a Red Pro actually is. I can't find any quantifiable differences indicated from the materials I've read.

 

[a_ump]

i am just your average gamer/media user so i have only one 1TB HDD. I've only used maybe 280gb worth....How do you people use so much space? are you video and photo editors or something?

 

[FX-GMC]

i am just your average gamer/media user so i have only one 1TB HDD. I've only used maybe 280gb worth....How do you people use so much space? are you video and photo editors or something?

If you store a lot of uncompressed video and audio it can add up fast.

 

[sweep]

I'm also unclear as to what the difference between a Red and a Red Pro actually is. I can't find any quantifiable differences indicated from the materials I've read.

Well the article is suggesting there will be a performance decrease if you put the standard red drives in a raid set larger than 8 drives. I wasn't even aware there was a limitation with red drives until reading this article. I'd be interested to know how much of a performance impact it would actually be if you exceeded the recommended number.

 

[silapakorn]

Considering that games nowadays are 15-30 GB in size, I may need one of those 6TB HDDs very soon.

 

[H3LLSMAN]

i am just your average gamer/media user so i have only one 1TB HDD. I've only used maybe 280gb worth....How do you people use so much space? are you video and photo editors or something?

Blue-ray movies, simple answer. Each one is anywhere from 18-25GB and if your getting the full disc version than your looking at 30+GB each. So seeing that each movie is say 22GB you could fill out 6TB in no time at all, I watch a delete. I simply do not have enough space on a 3TB for games/ movies/ tv shows to keep everything or most of what I download.I also like FLAC for my Music too, everything in HQ adds up quick.

Yes you could burn but that I reserve for If I really like it and do not want to get rid of the movie. These 6TB drives will be nice. 299.00 is not a bad price, pair 2 or 3 up with a RAM cache and that's one hell of a media storage solution. Games I like on SSD's also pared up with a RAM disk.

 

[The Von Matrices]

Well the article is suggesting there will be a performance decrease if you put the standard red drives in a raid set larger than 8 drives. I wasn't even aware there was a limitation with red drives until reading this article. I'd be interested to know how much of a performance impact it would actually be if you exceeded the recommended number.

I'm using 12 3TB WD REDs in one server with no issues (it's for my videography business). I suspect that the difference with the RED Pro is higher vibration tolerance and also a lower unrecoverable error rate, which gets more important when you have lots of drives in complex arrays. If you avoid dangerous RAID configurations (e.g. RAID 5), and perform regular patrol reads then you can mitigate the issue without the PRO, but cheaper RAID cards don't usually support such advanced functionality,

 

[timta2]

i am just your average gamer/media user so i have only one 1TB HDD. I've only used maybe 280gb worth....How do you people use so much space? are you video and photo editors or something?

Lots and lots of HD porn.

 

[xorbe]

Steam game hoarders.

 

[Per Hansson]

I'm also unclear as to what the difference between a Red and a Red Pro actually is. I can't find any quantifiable differences indicated from the materials I've read.

Warranty is 5 years vs 3
Spindle speed is 7200rpm vs 5400

This last point I'm not qualified to say for certain, but I think it's just marketing bullshit to make the numbers look better when infact they are the same?

Non-Recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read:
<1 in 10^14 WD Red
<10 in 10^15 WD Red Pro
<10 in 10^15 WD Se

Edit: Just for reference the Seagate Constellation ES.3, Hitachi Ultrastar He6 & 7K4000 are all rated for: 1 in 10^15

 

[Fx]

I'll stick with WD 4TB Blacks at $230 in a FreeNAS rig and pocket $30/each. They have a 5yr warranty as well.

I am already over this announcement, and am eager to receive some kind of news regarding WD 6TB Blacks.

 

[a_ump]

Lots and lots of HD porn.

lol i was waiting for this response. Yea i never thought of blu-ray video's though. I've watched blu-ray before i see an improvement over regular dvd....but idk if its worth 20x the disc space. actually for me it isn't as I never plan to buy blu-ray player/dvd's.