The helium – filled hard drives are not new, even WD was the first to experiment with this technology thanks to its Helioseal platform that met in 2014 and promised us drives up to 16 TB at affordable prices still below the SSDs. The key to these drives is their high reliability in large capacities, making them paramount for enterprise data centers.
Today Western Digital is announcing an update on its line ‘WD Red’ and ‘WD Red Pro’ which incorporate for the first time the Helioseal platform at a price that is not only aimed at the business market, but also the end user looking to mount a Powerful NAS at home or a small business.
WD Red gives the jump to 10TB now with Helioseal
This type of hard disk is hermetically sealed by replacing the air inside it with helium, which allows to offer a lower energy consumption, greater durability to reduce turbulence damage, higher density to record data without error and to be able to place more dishes in the same space.
Last year WD updated this line up to 8TB, but now it reaches 10TB and with helium, which makes them ideal for corporate private cloud installations but also for small businesses and end users, who were always excluded from this type of disks due to its high prices.
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The new discs come to cover the WD Red and WD Red Pro range, where one of the differences will be speed, as the first will be 5400 RPM while the Pro will reach up to 7200 RPM. On the other hand, speeds will be around 210MB / s and 240MB / s respectively. In the following table of Anandtech we can see in detail the differences between both as well as with his brothers smaller than 8TB.
The 10 TB WD Network drive is designed for personal or small business NAS systems with up to eight bays, while the 10 TB WD Network Pro is targeted at enterprise NAS systems with up to 16 bays. In both cases additional vibration protection and 6 Gbps SATA interface are offered.
Both discs will go on sale in the United States in the coming days for $ 494 for the WD Red 10TB with a three-year warranty, and $ 533 for the WD Red Pro with a five-year warranty.