Western Digital has announced the addition of three new NAS drives to its WD Red product line to improve performance, durability, capacity and accessibility for small businesses and home offices using NAS drives for their storage needs.
These new drives include the first WD Red SSDs that improve performance and caching capabilities in a hybrid NAS environment, as well as a 14TB storage option for WD Red and WD Red Pro hard drives.
As virtualization is increasingly used, 10 Gigabit Ethernet and higher connectivity speeds are becoming an essential feature of modern NAS systems. That's why Western Digital has developed the first WD Red SSDs to reduce performance bottlenecks.
The WD Red SA500 helps improve performance when used as a caching solution in a NAS system, while the new higher capacity WD Red and WD Red Pro hard drives offer more storage space on the same NAS device.
Refurbished NAS drives
The WD Red SA500 Red SSD is available in 2.5 "and M.2 form factors for greater comparability with a wider variety of systems and use cases. The 2.5-inch version of the WD Red SSD has a storage capacity of 500 GB to 4 TB, while the M.2 version has a storage capacity of 500 GB to 2 TB. Prices for the 2 "form factor Red SA5 WD Red SSDs range from € 500 to € 75, while the M.600 variant ranges from € 2 to € 72.
Meanwhile, the 14 TB capacity WT Red NAS hard drive costs € 600, while the 14 TB capacity WD Red NAS Pro hard drive costs € 700. These 14 TB hard drives, as well as the new SSDs WD Red, will be available worldwide starting in November.
Ziv Paz, senior director of marketing for the consumer computing segment at Western Digital, explained how their new NAS drives can benefit creators, stating:
"Increasing the performance of NAS systems can generate more content in less time." So creators or small businesses can work more efficiently to increase production and therefore potential revenue. Our higher capacity and improved endurance in the WD Red family allow you to store larger files and reduce storage bandwidth restrictions. For creators working on large projects over time, the latest WD Red SSD solution creates a hybrid NAS environment in which the SSD can serve as a caching mechanism for large files and frequently accessed files.