WD Red Pro 20TB HDD Review

WD’s 20TB Red Pro is built on a standard 3.5in footprint but the height has been increased to 26.1mm to accommodate the number of disks and actuators the drive uses. The drive has a spindle speed of 7,200rpm and there is an impressive 512MB of cache.

The drive uses 6th Gen WD HelioSeal Helium technology enabling the enclosure to hold nine 2.2TB aluminium discs along with eighteen heads. The drive uses Energy-Assisted Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (ePMR) and triple-stage actuator (TSA) technologies which help combat the threat of magnetic inter-track interference (ITI) which can be a real problem with the high areal density disks the drive is using.

We also find various NAS-focussed features and technologies. The most important of these is NASware 3.0 Technology. NASware is firmware that improves the overall reliability and performance of the drive. It uses intelligent error recovery to prevent hard drives from being dropped off the RAID due to extended error recovery which reduces the downtime needed to rebuild the RAID array. It also optimises the power requirements of the drive which can help reduce power consumption and can help to improve drive performance and reliability by reducing the temperature of the drive.

To help the drive survive the hostile environment of larger NAS enclosures (the Red Pro line supports up to 24 bay units) the drive is equipped with a multi-axis shock sensor that detects subtle shocks and dynamic fly height technology which adjusts each read-write function to compensate and protect the data. 3D Active Balance Plus ensures that the drive is properly balanced which helps lessen vibration, something that can cause major problems in large multi-disk environments, which in turn reduces noise levels.

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