Western Digital this morning hit the storage industry over its head with a couple of new high capacity hard drive options being offered in the company's WD Red line of drives. One is a 5-terabyte HDD and the other is a first-to-market 6-terabyte capacity HDD based on a tightly packed five-platter design, and like all WD Red drives, they're both intended for home and small office NAS systems

In addition to these new high capacity storage solutions, Western Digital announced the introduction of its WD Red Pro HDD series available in 1TB to 4TB capacities for the medium and large business NAS markets. WD's Pro level drives are compatibility tested with top NAS system manufacturers and optimized for power and performance.


"With the expansion and evolution of the WD Red family, WD once again is providing its loyal customers with increased capacity up to 6 TB; improved bay count support with up to 8 bays; increased product breadth with WD Red Pro; and more features with the latest generation of NASware technology," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president and general manager, WD Storage Technology. "WD continues to listen to its customers and bring exciting innovation to the category they helped to create."

While Seagate recently revealed that it's begun shipping 8TB HDDs to select enterprise clients, 6TB models like the WD Red introduced here still represent the highest capacity, single 3.5-inch drive solution available for home consumers. Furthermore, with Western Digital's NASware 3.0 update, WD Red drives are capable of supporting up to eight bay NAS systems with no negative impact to performance. Folks, that's up to 48TB of NAS storage available to consumers and small businesses - yowza!