14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital introduced on Tuesday its new WD Black and WD Red HDDs that are built for consumers or professionals who need both high performance and high capacity. WD wants the new 6TB HDD to be its highest-performing consumer-class hard disk drive that also brings extreme capacity.
The two new WD Black 6TB and 5TB hard disks arrive in a 3.5” form-factor, with a 7200rpm spindle speed, 128MB cache and Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface. What WD brings to the new models is more platters than the predecessors and higher capacity, increased cache size of 128MB and a dual-core processor.
The new 5TB and 6TB WD Red Pro are meant to operate perfectly in high-vibration environments and are built with shock protection in mind. Apparently, WD initiated a highly flexible shock protection technology that adjusts the actuator on the fly, keeping it further from the platter to protect the data, and closer to increase its higher read and write performance.
The American company did not disclose the number of platters inside the new drives or whether they will benefit from WD’s latest HelioSeal technology, or even SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording). Given their actual size they might have SMR, but we're unsure.
HDD manufacturers keep holding off the advance of SSDs with affordable prices
Right now, the biggest HDD in existence also belongs to WD. Called Ha10, it's a 10TB enterprise-oriented HDD that enjoys all the latest HelioSeal and SMR features to provide the best performance in its class.
The new WD Black and Red drives push the boundaries in an already saturated HDD market, bringing affordable storage sizes to consumers. With HDDs losing the battle of absolute size this past week when Samsung launched the world's largest hard disk, the PM1633a 16TB SSD at Flash Memory Summit in California, it's clear that Seagate and Western Digital won't lag behind and will try to offer to consumers better and more powerful HDDs while the enterprise industry slowly turns to SSDs for data storage and cloud computing.
According to Techpowerup, the price for the new WD drives will be $264 for the WD Black 5TB drive and $294 for the WD Black 6TB drive. The WD Red Pro 5 TB drive comes at 264 while the 6TB version comes at $299. They will also come with a five-year limited warranty.
