Western Digital Introduces 6 TB WD Red HDD

Western Digital is bringing a number of updates to its product lineups, most of them geared towards the WD Red series.

Let's start with the standard WD Red drives. Western Digital is adding a 5 TB and a 6 TB drive to the lineup. These drives now carry the NASware 3.0 feature set, and are built to be used in NAS systems with up to eight drives. They carry a three-year warranty.

Western Digital also introduced the new Red Pro lineup. These drives are intended to be used in NAS systems with between 8 and 16 drives, and these also come with the NASware 3.0 feature set. Initially, these will only come in 2 TB, 3 TB, and 4 TB capacities. WD includes a five-year warranty with the Red Pro hard drives, and aims for these drives to be used in medium to large business environments.

Concluding the updates, WD is also introducing 5 TB and 6 TB Green drives. These are the company's cool and quiet series of hard drives.

As a refresher, the main reason why the WD Red lineup exists is because NAS storage often includes a RAID setup, as opposed to single-drive setups in the typical desktop. The most important feature that the Red drives carry is TLER, or Time-Limited Error Recovery. In most RAID arrays you want a drive to have TLER enabled, as most RAID controllers will drop a drive out of the array if it doesn't respond within 7 seconds. Most desktop hard drives will keep attempting to read data from bad sectors for around 20 seconds. As a result, using desktop drives such as a WD Green drive in a RAID array can result in unnecessary data loss.

Pricing for the new drives is set at $249 and $299 for the WD Red 5 TB and 6 TB models, respectively. The WD Red Pro drives will be a little more expensive, priced at $159, $199, and $259 for the 2 TB, 3 TB, and 4 TB models, respectively.

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Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

  • Amdlova
    Old newssssssssssss
    Reply
  • thechief73
    Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Western Digital artificially remove TLER from all their drives firmware to create the Red line-up and the demand for such a drive? I know the Red's bring other features to the table as well, but that doesn't justify handicapping the other models.
    Reply
  • thundervore
    Please correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Western Digital artificially remove TLER from all their drives firmware to create the Red line-up and the demand for such a drive? I know the Red's bring other features to the table as well, but that doesn't justify handicapping the other models.

    Which is why I no longer buy their drives. They have Green, Blue, Red, Purple, Black, and Velociraptor. there is no need for one company to flood the market with so many drives for no reason. People use to be able to buy the WD green drives and use them in RAID until WD decided to make the head parking time every 2 minutes then release a Red drive for more money with a longer head parking time.
    Reply
  • unksol
    THIS JUST IN "old news with lack of detail + inaccurate info"

    You got it direct from toms skim and copy with a side of misunderstanding
    Reply
  • unksol
    THIS JUST IN "old news with lack of detail + inaccurate info"

    You got it direct from toms skim and copy with a side of misunderstanding
    Reply
  • Darkk
    I personally don't have a problem with Western Digital producing different type of drives. However, I do agree that there are too many variants available. I've been using the 3TB reds for several months and never had a problem with them in my FreeNAS as I know they are made specifically for that purpose. Biggest difference with the reds not only with TLER but also low power and low heat for 24/7 operation. Complain about higher price? Think how much a true SAS enterprise class hard drive cost? It's overkill for small business and home so the reds fit the bill just fine.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    The 5TB and 6TB WD's use helium like Hitachi?

    Now please up the capacity for the Scorpio Blue and Black mobile drives. 750GB @ 7200RPM is beat by the Travelstar 7K1000 and make a hybrid option (not the black^2 drive)
    Reply
  • Haravikk
    I was about to start replacing older drives with 4tb Reds, looks like I may now use 6tb ones instead, assuming the UK price isn't too inflated of course. Next stop, 24tb porn drive… =D
    Reply
  • applegetsmelaid
    Drive looks black to me.
    Reply
  • lp231
    In other news Seagate has begun shipping sample 8TB HDD to its major customers.
    http://vr-zone.com/articles/seagate-announces-8tb-hard-drive-samples-shipped-customers/80599.html
    Reply