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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