Western Digital Announces 10TB Helium WD Red And Red Pro NAS-Optimized Hard Drives
Western Digital’s popular WD Red and WD Red Pro storage families are expanding once again, this time moving into 10TB territory (up from the previous high of 8GB). As you might expect with today’s high-capacity hard disk drives, the latest entries are filled with helium (branded HelioSeal in Western Digital parlance) to reduce platter drag and thus improve performance.
Given the “Red” designation, these new HDDs are optimized for NAS environments and incorporate 3D Active Balance Plus technology to improve performance and reliability. The WD Red spins at 5400RPM, features 128MB of cache, and is targeted at SOHO customers. The WD Red Pro spins at 7200RPM, comes with 128MB of cache and is directed at the SMB market.
Both the WD Red and WD Red Pro use a SATA 6GB/sec interface and features NASware 3.0 technology to ease integration with Western Digital’s MyCloud Pro Series and MyCloud Expert Series NAS systems.
“In July 2012, we introduced the WD Red line to address the unique performance, compatibility and scalability challenges facing home and small business NAS customers,” stated Brendan Collins, Vice President of the Devices Business Unit for Western Digital.
“Five years and over 16 million WD Red family hard drives later, we continue to advance the platform, bringing our innovative HelioSeal platform and other advanced technologies that allow customers to meet their evolving private cloud needs.”
The 10TB WD Red is available now from select retailers with an MSRP of $494, while the 10TB Red Pro is priced at $533. The drives come with three-year and five-year warranties respectively.
