WD 6TB Black and Red Pro Edition HDDs Announced

Update: Newegg now has availability for the 6TB Black, along with Amazon.

Soon to be at an etailer near you, WD has announced two new 6TB hard drive densities for the Black and Red families, covering high-density NAS and high performance desktop scenarios.

6TB drives have been available for a while, but typically in the more mid-range sectors, such as with the Green for desktop storage, and the Red for NAS. The new Red Pro drive is slightly different from the normal Red drives in that it has a longer warranty and is capable of scaling up to 16 drives per NAS (rather than 8 for the normal Red). In addition, the Red Pros pack in 128MB of cache and are suited for high workloads, i.e. systems with 24/7 continuous access.

The new 6TB WD Blacks are also released at the same time. These are the top-of-line, high density, high performance drives used in very demanding workloads with large data assets. Designed with reliability in mind as well, these also come with a 5-year warranty. The new Blacks also come with 128MB of cache, and are reportedly 29% faster than the previous generation 4TB Blacks.

The new 6TB Blacks will retail for around $294, and the 5TB Blacks for $264. The Red Pros are a fraction dearer at $269 for the 5TB and $299 for the 6TB drive.