Recently, Western Digital introduced a new technology to rival Seagate’s HAMR HDDs – a drive design featuring a record-breaking 11 platters. Thanks to these 11 platters, WD can now offer HDDs with a capacity of 26 TB using conventional CMR recording, avoiding SMR. Now, the company is launching a drive that leverages this technology for NAS systems – the 26TB WD Red Pro, which enables the creation of a four-bay array exceeding 100 TB.
WD’s 11-platter drives offer capacities of either 32 TB with SMR or 26 TB without it (using CMR). For NAS and general RAID setups, CMR drives are preferred because the unpredictable performance of SMR drives makes them unsuitable. WD is now introducing these 26 TB CMR models in the Red Pro series, making them the largest HDDs designed for NAS deployments.
The WD Red Pro 26TB, labelled WD260KFGX , is based on helium atmosphere technology (HelioSeal) and 11 platters of the 3.5″ type. It also utilizes OptiNAND technology, where the drive stores its metadata in NAND flash memory, freeing up more of the physical recording area on the platters for user data. The drives are expected to use ePMR (or ePMR 2) recording, which WD refers to as “energy-assisted,” though it isn’t on the level of HAMR or MAMR technologies. The drive operates at a standard rotational speed of 7200 RPM and uses a SATA interface.
According to specifications, the drive achieves sequential access speeds of up to 272 MB/s and is manufactured with a 512 MB cache (separate from the UFS device capacity used for OptiNAND). The drive comes with a five-year warranty, supports continuous operation, and is, of course, RAID-ready. It includes vibration protection sensors to prevent interference from other drives in the array (actively avoiding resonance and amplification of vibrations) and a multi-axis shock sensor that actively adjusts the head height above the platter to protect against head crashes caused by shocks.
Noise levels are rated at 25 dBA when the platters spin but heads and theirs actuators are idle and 32 dB during head movement, which is not insignificant. These drives are truly designed for separate storage systems, not for PCs running right next to your ear. On the other hand, thanks to helium filling, power consumption is relatively modest (3.6 W when idle during just platter rotation and 6.0 W during read/write activity). In power-saving mode with the platters not rotating, standby consumption is 1.1 W.
In addition to the standalone drive, the company will also release a series of external drives and storage solutions based on these drives, under the SanDisk G-Drive, SanDisk G-Drive Project, and G-RAID Project 2 (52 TB capacity) brands, as well as the SanDisk G-RAID Shuttle 4 and G-RAID Shuttle 8 enclosures, which contain four or eight drives and can offer capacities of up to 104 TB and 208 TB, respectively, when configured in RAID 0 mode without redundancy (though the devices also support RAID 5, 6, 1, 10, 50, and 60).
Sources: WD (1, 2, 3), ComputerBase
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
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