WD Red Pro Hard Drives

Main articles:

• Hard drive (magnetic drive, winchester, HDD)
• Hard Drives (Global Market)
• Hard Drives (Russian Market)

2022: WD Red Pro WD201KFGX

On March 1, 2022, it became known that Western Digital released a sufficiently large consumer hard drive with built-in flash memory, which is not inferior in volume to a number of SSD drives. According to the Tom's Hardware portal, despite the great opportunities presented by Western Digital, the disk is aimed specifically at ordinary consumers, and not at corporate customers.

Western Digital has built 64 GB of high-speed UFS flash memory into its hard drive, like many SSDs. The company does not disclose other memory specifications, including read and write speeds. It HDD itself holds 20 TB to information achieve this, the developers fit nine plates of 2.2 TB each in a standard 3.5-inch case. This consumer solution can be installed computer in or at home. file storage

Western Digital has developed a so-called "hybrid" hard drive. Flash memory in such drives is used to accelerate the operation of the disk subsystem. It houses the most commonly used files, including those of the operating system, since flash memory is always faster than hard disk mechanics.

The presented drive belongs to the Red Pro series and has the WD201KFGX index. As planned by the manufacturer, it should be used in networked storage (NAS), but nothing prevents it from being installed in a system unit or turned into a portable storage medium.

On the Western Digital website, such a drive is sold for $500. When and at what price it will be sold in Russia is still unknown. The drive warranty is five years.

WD Red Pro connectivity is achieved by using a conventional 6 Gb/s SATA III interface. It is fully compatible with the first two versions of the interface, which allows you to install the drive even in ancient computers by current standards.

But connecting to SATA I and SATA II will not achieve a high speed of information transfer, and for SATA III it in this case does not exceed 268 MB/s. Compared to current SSD drives, this is very small, but here everything rests on the nominal capacity - in this regard, consumer SSDs are still losing to winchesters.

Inside the 20 terabyte Western Digital Red Pro, there is a separate 512 MB memory buffer. The spindle speed is standard for consumer winchesters - 7,200 revolutions per minute. This HDD is designed to load up to 300 TB per year.

According to Tom's Hardware, in its drive, Western Digital uses the standard CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) recording technology - magnetic recording without overlapping tracks. In the context of a hard drive focused primarily on file server use, this is important.

In April 2020, it became known that all major HDD manufacturers used tile recording technology (SMR, Shingled Magnetic Recording) in hard drives for network file stores. It is used to increase the density of data recording, which allows you to fit more information on each plate of the winchester. In its specifics, it is radically different from the more famous CMR and PMR recording technologies.

Many file servers are partially or completely incompatible with SMR winchesters. As a result, they either simply do not perform their function as part of the vault, or work more slowly than required.

Companies and Toshiba Seagate Western Digital were involved in this scandal. For the latter, this resulted in the threat of lawsuits.^[1]

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