AfterDawn: News

WD: 5TB hard drives coming next year

According to leaked WD slides, the company is planning two 5TB hard drives for release by the end of next year.

The slides show a WD Green and a WD Red model, each of which will be standard 3.5-inch SATA 3 6 Gb/s models.



Green-series hard drives are manufactured with lead-free, conflict-free and halogen-free materials and are environmentally conscious.

Additionally, 4TB Red and Green models will be released sometime in the Q2 or Q3 of next year, following the recent release of a 4TB Black model.

"Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance--without compromise," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD's client storage group, at the time. "In choosing WD Black hard drives, WD desktop customers get the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability to handle intense desktop computing with ease."

See pics of the slides at the source.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 4 Dec 2012 21:48

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• 22 comments

• ThePastor

  Ummmm, wow... it's about time
  

  Oh, Im sorry... Did the middle of my sentence interrupt the beginning of yours?

  5.12.2012 12:07 #1

• A5J4DX

  Originally posted by ThePastor: Ummmm, wow... it's about time yep about time
  

  5.12.2012 13:48 #2

• hearme0

  I'll take 2........but for only 129.99 each.......not a penny more.

  5.12.2012 16:49 #3

• Interestx

  It's just a shame prices are taking so long to get back to pre-Thai flood/quake levels.
  They're nearly therte but not quite.
  
  Meantime I'm reusing 1tb drives I had shelved from my last (2tb) upgrade.
  
  Maybe I'll give the 3tb drives a miss & go straight to 4tb - if the prices are right.
  

  5.12.2012 17:35 #4

• scorpNZ

  Yeah right a 5tb have fun defraging that one,best leave it running while you go on holiday it should be done by the time you get back :P
  

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  5.12.2012 18:29 #5

• bobiroc

  Originally posted by scorpNZ: Yeah right a 5tb have fun defraging that one,best leave it running while you go on holiday it should be done by the time you get back :P In case you missed it Modern Operating systems defrag on the go these days. Also data storage drives do not get all fragged up as much as an OS drive does.
  

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  5.12.2012 19:42 #6

• Interestx

  Originally posted by scorpNZ: Yeah right a 5tb have fun defraging that one,best leave it running while you go on holiday it should be done by the time you get back :P With 5tbs why would you even worry about defraging?
  They're bound to be mostly used (especially the 'green' ones) for media storage (HD movie files I'd guess).
  So what's the big deal?
  

  5.12.2012 21:30 #7

• cart0181

  Originally posted by bobiroc: Originally posted by scorpNZ: Yeah right a 5tb have fun defraging that one,best leave it running while you go on holiday it should be done by the time you get back :P In case you missed it Modern Operating systems defrag on the go these days. Also data storage drives do not get all fragged up as much as an OS drive does. By "modern OS" do you mean Vista and Win7? In my experience (which happens to be quite extensive in this area) Vista never seemed to do a good job of actually performing those supposedly "scheduled" defrags. Windows 7 was somewhat better on that front, but still not very good. I can't comment on Win8 yet in this area. I find that Norton's automatic "optimize" feature beats them both in practice. That being said, I never trust any defrag utility to take care of business on its own. I will always go in and baby-sit the process. No one should be condemned for bringing up such a valid point. If (and I wouldn't) I used one of these drives as my system drive, I would certainly partition it to something more manageable. Thank you both for bringing up these points as it is certainly a valid discussion.

  5.12.2012 23:26 #8

• scorpNZ

  The post wasn't meant to be taken so literally there is a :p there at the end
  
  in 3rd party utilities say like defraggler or ultradefrag they have an optimize feature,if anyone thought defragging took a long time they ain't seen noth'n yet..lol..you'd have to try it you'll see what i mean
  
  the comp has to be idle for the defrag in vista & win 7 to work including the scheduled defrag its been that way since well xp & there was a setting in tweakui for xp to set drive to defrag automatically,windows search works the same way the os has to be idle
  
  since it was asked:
  why would i defrag such a large drive if i had one ? well apart from the obvious personally i wouldn't even have an issue in using one as an OS drive or data drive regardless if it was green or not,i run green drives now a 750 & 1.5tb,nothing wrong with them speed wise well not internally anyway,however a couple of 5tb would go down real well, i could do with the space it would also negate the need for a stack of external hdd's,keeping in mind i have a modest dvd collection including tv dvd's (thats sd not hd dvds),all currently being encoded to shock! horror! avi xvid..lol..short story original xbox plays them better so compatibility is why i chose avi or it would've been mp4 or mkv,yeah so defragging would be required as i'd be ripping dvd's to them encoding then deleting the video_ts folder at some point the video_ts folders & the encoded videos would get placed on the same drive & partition as space became scarce & would also get encoded to the same partition the dvd's were on,well that's one such scenario then there's drive imaging not to mention general install & delete on a daily basis or transfer & deletion anywhere on the drive etc,etc
  

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  6.12.2012 00:31 #9

• plazma247

  1. Will these green drives require the green function to be turned off to avoid a premature death under anything but windows??
  
  2. Aggg defrag, isnt everyone either rocking ext3/4 or using an ssd for a boot drives these days
  
  As for skipping the 3TB and jumping to a 4TB, yeah thats ok if your buying hitachi, but if you look at seagate the 4's are nearly double the price of the 3's
  
  WArrrrr when i can have a depleted uranium platter !!! lol http://www.howtogeek.com/93713/are-depl...r-future-video/
  
  Or do we all wait for the 10TB Drives from TDK?: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/26133/tdk...logy/index.html
  
  
  

  7.12.2012 14:54 #10

• Interestx

  @ Plasma247
  
  I was thinking more along the lines of by the time I need to buy some new drives the WD 4gbs should be about & hopefully at a competitive price.
  

  7.12.2012 15:38 #11

• scorpNZ

  Originally posted by plazma247: 1. Will these green drives require the green function to be turned off to avoid a premature death under anything but windows??
  
  2. Aggg defrag, isnt everyone either rocking ext3/4 or using an ssd for a boot drives these days
  
  As for skipping the 3TB and jumping to a 4TB, yeah thats ok if your buying hitachi, but if you look at seagate the 4's are nearly double the price of the 3's
  
  WArrrrr when i can have a depleted uranium platter !!! lol http://www.howtogeek.com/93713/are-depl...r-future-video/
  
  Or do we all wait for the 10TB Drives from TDK?: http://www.tweaktown.com/news/26133/tdk...logy/index.html
  
  No! green is the materials its made of; you know lead free n such..lol..
  

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  7.12.2012 15:57 #12

• plazma247

  Quote:No! green is the materials its made of; you know lead free n such..lol.. No its not, everything is lead free solder now, the green ranger is lower power and previous models have had an auto sleep function, which worked ok under ntfs and went tick tick tick fail under linux.
  
  I would wait and see if tdk brings out a 10gb drive 2q later as thats going to make all drives drop in price.

  7.12.2012 16:20 #13

• scorpNZ

  That's what i used to think green drives were however the materials used have been changed as well to non carcinogenic to the enviroment
  
  i'm familiar with the tick tick,happens in windows as well (externals)turning the hdd off & back on usually solves it if it didn't run first time round the linux issue can be solved the same way if lucky or change power management values in linux's registry,tho not always successful
  

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  8.12.2012 12:14 #14

• plazma247

  Turning off the sleep auto sleep function in WD Greens: http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critica...green-hdds.html
  
  Or if you cant boot from CD/USB to apply the fix under linux (maybe a nas):
  
  http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/
  
  Then just use hdparm as normal if you want to sleep the drive.
  
  As for the environmental friendly that maybe true as well, it also mainly relates to the slower spindle speed compared to the higher spindle speed of the blacks.
  
  Ive heard and seen a few horror stories because of the greens going bad prematurely due to the function not being known about and disabled.
  
  If your getting a tick tick under windows its not likely to be the idle3 issue and i would consider reading the smart table for the drive and have a look for anything that looks odd as it doesn't sound to healthy to me.

  8.12.2012 13:28 #15

• gilboa

  I wonder when we are going to get the reliability we had 5 years ago. Presently 20% of all the drives I buy are DOA and another 30% fail within months not years. Replacement drives under warranty are junk.

  8.12.2012 15:15 #16

• scorpNZ

  Originally posted by plazma247: Turning off the sleep auto sleep function in WD Greens: http://www.ngohq.com/news/19805-critica...green-hdds.html
  
  Or if you cant boot from CD/USB to apply the fix under linux (maybe a nas):
  
  http://idle3-tools.sourceforge.net/
  
  Then just use hdparm as normal if you want to sleep the drive.
  
  As for the environmental friendly that maybe true as well, it also mainly relates to the slower spindle speed compared to the higher spindle speed of the blacks.
  
  Ive heard and seen a few horror stories because of the greens going bad prematurely due to the function not being known about and disabled.
  
  If your getting a tick tick under windows its not likely to be the idle3 issue and i would consider reading the smart table for the drive and have a look for anything that looks odd as it doesn't sound to healthy to me. The drives ok platter wise i've boiled it down to the interfaces of the hdd housing & the hdd & quite possibly the computer usb ports not quite syncing for lack of a better word,does it with my older xp comp as well,once running it'll be fine for hours or days,just every now again it'll go stupid
  

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  8.12.2012 17:30 #17

• sammorris

  Originally posted by gilboa: I wonder when we are going to get the reliability we had 5 years ago. Presently 20% of all the drives I buy are DOA and another 30% fail within months not years. Replacement drives under warranty are junk. Not any time soon. There is only a single 'quality' manufacturer in the market, which is Western Digital (to the cringing of many). Seagate have firmly established themselves at the budget end of the market by undercutting WD, axing the majority of their product lines and slashing warranties on their products to just 1 year.
  
  The biggest problem we have to face is dire support for drives larger than 2TB. Having owned several 3TB drives, they're a nightmare to try and support without losing file systems here there and everywhere. My data is far, far less secure on 3TB drives than on smaller ones, and that's not even due to the error rate, it's just down to the complete unknown of whether the data is going to go away when I cross the 2.16TB barrier...
  I'll be honest, GPT does not impress me in the slightest. There must be a better way of doing things!
  

  
  
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  updated 25-May-11

  8.12.2012 17:48 #18

• KillerBug

  I just bought a new hard drive for the first time since the flooding...got myself a 2TB drive for my laptop. Yeah, it was a bit pricy, but cheaper than it would have been before the floods (not available outside of paying someone to steal it from development lab before the flood).
  
  I have no intentions to buy any 3.5 drives for a while...from what I see, there isn't a single quality manufacturer of SATA 3.5" hard drives over 2TB...and I have a pile of those that all still work perfectly (I bought a ton of them before the flood). Sure, I can spend a small fortune on SAS drives and get quality, but at $400 for 3TB and $480 for 4TB, it isn't worth it.
  

  
  

  9.12.2012 01:14 #19

• gilboa

  Originally posted by sammorris: Originally posted by gilboa: I wonder when we are going to get the reliability we had 5 years ago. Presently 20% of all the drives I buy are DOA and another 30% fail within months not years. Replacement drives under warranty are junk. Not any time soon. There is only a single 'quality' manufacturer in the market, which is Western Digital (to the cringing of many). Seagate have firmly established themselves at the budget end of the market by undercutting WD, axing the majority of their product lines and slashing warranties on their products to just 1 year.
  
  The biggest problem we have to face is dire support for drives larger than 2TB. Having owned several 3TB drives, they're a nightmare to try and support without losing file systems here there and everywhere. My data is far, far less secure on 3TB drives than on smaller ones, and that's not even due to the error rate, it's just down to the complete unknown of whether the data is going to go away when I cross the 2.16TB barrier...
  I'll be honest, GPT does not impress me in the slightest. There must be a better way of doing things! I bought 6 Western Digital FAEX (1-2TB) Drives about a year ago at different times from different suppliers 5 were DOA I have been through over 30 warranty replacements and now a year later I only have one working drive for my expenditure of over $1000.
  

  9.12.2012 05:11 #20

• sammorris

  I've owned 41 low power WD drives (40 Green, 1 Red recently purchased), and about 9 or 10 older drives (including two early 37GB Raptors) - of those, I've only had one genuine faulty drive (500GB SE16), may have a second (WD30EZRX) but have yet to vindicate the controller it's attached to.
  
  Mileage varies significantly with hard disks, and the one thing I've noticed is people buying HDDs online from places like newegg seem to suffer vastly more DOAs than those buying from high street stores. That begs the question whether the fault is not in fact due to the shipping process...
  

  
  
  Afterdawn Addict // Silent PC enthusiast // PC Build advisor // LANGamer Alias:Ratmanscoop
  PC Specs page -- http://my.afterdawn.com/sammorris/blog_entry.cfm/5036
  updated 25-May-11

  9.12.2012 05:39 #21

• KillerBug

  Originally posted by sammorris: I've owned 41 low power WD drives (40 Green, 1 Red recently purchased), and about 9 or 10 older drives (including two early 37GB Raptors) - of those, I've only had one genuine faulty drive (500GB SE16), may have a second (WD30EZRX) but have yet to vindicate the controller it's attached to.
  
  Mileage varies significantly with hard disks, and the one thing I've noticed is people buying HDDs online from places like newegg seem to suffer vastly more DOAs than those buying from high street stores. That begs the question whether the fault is not in fact due to the shipping process... It also begs questions about build quality when you can order 10 Seagate 3.5" drives and 10 WD 3.5" drives from the same place and all of the WD drives are DOA while all the Seagate drives work perfectly for years and years. There is more to making a good drive than just making it last a long time in static conditions...it should be able to take physical abuse as well. I've been driving around with 5 2TB seagate drives in my truck for the last year...I've hit bumps that made my teeth hurt, I had a screen rattle apart, I had to use locktite on the case screws, I have black RTV holding the back of my video card to the slot because the plastic clip doesn't do the job well enough, and parts of the outer shell of my laptop have fallen off after the plastic bits that the screws go into broke off...and all 5 Seagates still work perfectly. All that said, I wouldn't trust a 3TB Seagate to hold a redundant copy of a backup.
  

  
  

  9.12.2012 12:02 #22