These days, the highest-capacity drives are typically aimed at cloud service providers (CSPs) and enterprises, but that doesn’t mean creative professionals or average users don’t need them. In order to meet the needs of more ordinary consumers, Western Digital has begun shipping the Red Pro 24 TB hard drive, which is targeted at high-end NAS for creative professionals with higher storage needs.
Launched approximately 20 months after its 22 TB model becomes available in 2022, Western Digital’s Red Pro 24 TB drive provides an incremental improvement to WD’s highest-capacity NAS and consumer drive products. The platform uses Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) at 7200 RPM, features 512 MB cache, and uses OptiNAND technology to increase reliability and optimize performance and power consumption. HDDs are rated for media-to-cache transfer rates of up to 287 MB/s, making them one of the fastest drives available (although still slower than CSP and enterprise-focused HDDs).
Like other high-end network-attached storage-specific HDDs, the Red Pro 24 TB drive uses a helium-filled platform that’s very similar to those designed for enterprise drives. That’s why the Red Pro 24 TB HDD is equipped with a rotational vibration sensor that predicts and proactively counteracts disturbances caused by increased vibration; a multi-axis shock sensor that detects subtle shock events and automatically counteracts them with Dynamic Fly Height technology to ensure the head will not be affected. Scratch disk.
Compared to WD Gold and Ultraster 22 TB and 24 TB drives for enterprise and cloud data centers, what these drives lack is ArmorCache functionality, which provides power loss protection when write caching is enabled (WCE mode) and Enhanced performance when write caching is disabled (WCD mode).
In terms of reliability, Western Digital’s Red Pro 24 TB HDD is designed to operate 24/7 in vibration environments, such as enterprise-class NAS with multi-bay loads, rated workloads up to 550 TB/year and Up to 600,000 load/unload cycles, consistent with the performance offered by Western Digital’s WD Gold and Ultrastar drives.
As for power consumption, the WD Red Pro 24 TB consumes up to 6.4W during read and write operations, 3.9W in idle mode, and 1.2W in standby/sleep mode.
Western Digital’s Red Pro 24 TB (WD240KFGX) HDD is shipping to resellers and NAS manufacturers now and is expected to be available soon. Expect these drives to be slightly cheaper than the WD Gold 24 TB models.