Western Digital (WD) is having a busy Tuesday, as the company is reporting that it has added 6TB models to its WD Black and WD Red Pro lines of mechanical hard drives. The Black model is best suited for gamers and professionals craving high-performance while the Red Pro drive is ideal for network attached storage (NAS) devices. WD also indicated that both lines are getting a 5 TB model as well.
“The WD Black 6TB is up to 29 percent faster than the previous WD Black 4TB version in maximum data rate throughput and 10 percent faster in PCMark Vantage,” the company boasts.
Unfortunately, the WD Black specifications don’t reveal much in regards to hardware details, but instead shows that the 3,5-inch hard drive has a 7200 RPM and SATA 3 (6 Gbps) connectivity. The drive also sports a dual-core processor, 128MB of cache and StableTrac technology, which stabilizes the drive’s motor shaft and protects the platters from “system-induced” vibrations.
“The Dynamic Cache Technology improves caching algorithms in real time to allocate and optimize cache between reads and writes,” the company adds. “This movement of cache for read data helps to reduce congestion and increase overall performance.”
The new 6TB WD Black model (WD6001FZWX) is available now for $294 and the 5TB model (WD5001FZWX) is selling for $264. On a whole, the WD Black line provide capacities between 500GB to the new 6TB and offers a 5-year warranty.
As for the WD Red Pro drives, these are NAS-focused and include a multi-axis shock sensor that, according to WD, will detect shock events and adjust each read-write function accordingly. The drives also include exclusive NASware 3.0 firmware and hardware vibration compensation technology, which corrects rotational and linear vibrations “in real time.”
Built for medium to large-sized businesses, the WD RED Pro specifications show that the drives are designed for NAS solutions with up to 16 bays. They also have SATA 3 (6 Gbps) connectivity and 128MB of cache. Capacities on a whole range from 2TB to the new 5TB and 6TB models.
“With the capacity expansion, there is now a path for customers to increase the storage density of their systems while knowing their data is protected with the most trusted and valued brand on the market,” says Cindi Grace, senior vice president of WD storage technology group.
The new WD Red Pro 5TB model (WD5001FFWX) is available now and costs $269 whereas the 6TB model (WD6001FFWX) costs a meatier $299. These drives also come with a 5-year warranty.
From maximumpc
from http://bit.ly/1MBtQVH
