New WD Red Pro NAS hard drives offer up to 24TB of storage

In context: While consumers have mostly replaced HDDs with solid state storage drives in their PC systems, NAS devices are still making use of traditional magnetic units. HDDs can offer significantly higher capacities than SSDs, with newer technology solutions designed to provide higher reliability levels.

Western Digital is now shipping the latest models in its WD Red Pro line of NAS HDDs, providing up to 24 terabytes of storage capacity in a traditional 3.5-inch form factor. WD Red Pro hard disks are enterprise-class drives engineered for high performance and reliability, according to the product’s official page, and designed to handle intense workload conditions in non-stop operation mode.

The latest WD Red Pro model of NAS hard drives (WD240KFGX) employs conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and a 7200 RPM rotation speed to provide a reliable level of performance, Western Digital says. Built on a SATA 6 Gbps interface, the WD Red Pro drives are filled with helium for capacities between 14TB and 24TB, and with air for capacities between 2TB and 12TB, providing data transfer speeds up to 287 MBps.

Western Digital rates the drives for 550TB annual workloads, and offers a 5-year limited warranty for all the WD Red Pro models. MTBF is 2,500,000 on the 24TB model, while a 512MB cache helps with moving all that digital data around. WD also employs its OptiNAND technology (on 22TB and 24TB models) to improve reliability and optimize performance and energy needs. Power consumption goes from 1.2W in standby/sleep mode to 6.4W during I/O operations.

Other advanced technologies designed to make the WD Red Pro drives properly work in stressful conditions include NASware, WD’s exclusive fine-tuning tech to match NAS system workloads. The drives are also equipped with rotation vibration (RV) sensors, which should help with anticipating and “proactively” countering excessive vibrations, and a multi-axis shock sensor to detect “subtle” shock events and compensate.

Western Digital says the WD Red Pro HDDs have been tested on a wide range of NAS devices thanks to its partnership with major vendors. Because of this “extensive” testing procedure, the drives should be compatible with most NAS enclosures currently available on the market.

WD says its new, large-capacity WD Red Pro drives are ideal for multimedia creative professionals, medium-to-large business ventures, and commercial and enterprise-class NAS systems. Such spacious hard disks don’t come cheap though, with the newest 24TB model featuring an official price of $570. The HDDs are now shipping to resellers and NAS manufacturers, while consumers should be able to purchase them soon.