WD Launching 5TB HDDs By End of 2013

By Kevin Parrish
published

Two 5 TB drives are expected to hit the market by 4Q13, claims two leaked Western Digital slides.

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 (opens in new tab), 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 (opens in new tab). 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 (opens in new tab). 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.

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Kevin Parrish
39 Comments Comment from the forums
  • vern72
    Darn it! Almost enough to make me upgrade my Core 2 system.
    Reply
  • ipwn3r456
    Wow 5TB. So 1TB per platter?
    Reply
  • azathoth
    Is this their new system with hermetically sealed drives containing Helium to reduce drag?

    If so, I might consider purchasing one so I can finally make FULLY submerged and silent Oil PC. Neat home media server project :)
    Reply
  • 5TB... damn that's a lot of space but I'd rather have 2 x 3Tb drives so if one fails you don't loose all your data.... but if your data is that important then you'd have those drives in a raid 1 array + regular backups
    Reply
  • wannabepro
    Think of all that.. games, Um, I mean 'information' you could store on one of those.
    Reply
  • dragonsqrrl
    I'd really like to see a review of the 4TB Caviar Black that just came out.
    Reply
  • Platter information. please. im dying to know if these are going to have >1tb platters, or just 5 1tb platters
    Reply
  • tomfreak
    Chaoss5TB... damn that's a lot of space but I'd rather have 2 x 3Tb drives so if one fails you don't loose all your data.... but if your data is that important then you'd have those drives in a raid 1 array + regular backupsAgree, data is more important now. I rather have twice the reliability @ same price than twice the size when it is over 1-2TB already.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    In 2011 (before the floods) we were promised 6TB drives before the end of 2012, but between the floods and PMR reliability issues that really hasn't panned out so well.
    Reply
  • Still insufficient for my pony r34 collection.
    Reply