Russian website AlwaysMoreDigital has supposedly unearthed (via leaked presentation slides) schedules for Western Digital's WD Green and WD Red series of hard drives for 2012 and 2013. Both schedules show that the company is shooting for a 3.5-inch 5 TB SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) drive by the end of 2013.
The WD Green series is the company's more environmentally-friendly line of desktop drives, manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials. According to the leaked schedule, a 4 TB model (WD40EZRX) is expected to ship sometime around the second or third quarter of 2013. The 5 TB model (WD50EXRX) is slated to arrive in the following quarter. Both will sport a 3.5-inch form factor, 64 MB of cache, and a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) interface.
The WD Red series is for home or small office network attached storage (NAS) systems. A new 4 TB model (WD40EFRX) is expected to arrive sometime around 2Q and 3Q 2013. After that, the 5 TB model (WD50EFRX) will supposedly arrive in 4Q 2013. As with the Green drives, both of these NAS-oriented HDDs will have a 3.5-inch form factor, 64 MB of cache, and a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) interface.
News of the upcoming Green and Red 4 and 5 TB hard drives arrinves after the company expanded its Black series of 3.5-inch drives with a 4 TB model. Available now, the new addition features a 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB of cache, dual stage actuator technology, a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor for "twice the processing power to maximize performance."
"Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance—without compromise," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD’s client storage group. "In choosing WD Black hard drives, WD desktop customers get the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability to handle intense desktop computing with ease."
WD will likely showcase the upcoming Green and Red drives at CES 2013 in January, so stay tuned for more information. Meanwhile, the new WD Black 4 TB drive can be purchased here.