Black Friday brings plenty of deals for storage devices, and today, you can buy a 20TB WD Red Pro NAS hard drive for only $319 — an all-time low price for this drive. While the WD Red Pro is marketed as a NAS drive, it is also designed to offer top-tier performance in desktop PCs, too, so you can use this drive in your PC with confidence. This pricing is exceptional, too, working out to only $16 per terabyte of storage.
Hard drives aren't as popular for speedy data access as they used to be — you'll want one of the best SSDs for that task — but they're still great for cheap and deep storage for data that doesn't need lightning-fast access, like pictures, videos, and backups.
The WD Red Pro is perfect for bulk data storage, and it doesn't use the slow SMR technology that's common in cheap drives; instead, it uses faster CMR recording to ensure consistent, fast performance.
The WD Red Pro provides 20TB of storage capacity, driven by a 7,200-RPM motor that delivers up to 272 MB/s of performance in sequential read/write workloads. That's more than enough for speed for bulk storage in a PC. The Red Pro connects over a standard SATA 6 Gb/s connection and has a 300 TB/year workload rating, meaning it is designed to have 300TB of data written to it per year. The drive also uses WD's OptiNAND tech to employ flash storage to offload metadata storage, thus delivering better performance in some workloads.
The WD Red performs similarly to other top-tier offerings in heavy sustained workloads. The drive also has a 512MB DRAM cache for metadata and delivers great 4KB latency, which helps when accessing the small file types that HDDs struggle with.
Our Western Digital Red Pro 20TB HDD Review has extensive benchmarks for your perusal. Our only complaints about this drive in our review were pricing, which is addressed by today's sale, and the comparatively lower workload rating. However, this drive is more than enough for even demanding NAS works and far exceeds the needs of the majority of PC users. It also has a five-year warranty to ensure peace of mind, and comes with expanded rotational vibration protection mechanisms to help ensure a longer lifespan in demanding multi-drive environments.
We are working hard to find the best deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for other products, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.
