Western Digital Launches 20 TB NAS HDD with 64 GB iNAND

Although 20 TB hard drives aren’t a new thing by now, Western Digital’s latest drive for NAS appliances are doing things a bit differently by incorporating WD’s OptiNAND technology. The WD Red Pro family is Western Digital’s higher-end family of NAS drives and have a generally good reputation in the market. The drive is made up out of nine ePMR (energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording) platters, each coming in at 2.2 TB. As with the previously launched drives in the Red Pro family, we’re looking at a 7,200 rpm drive with a SATA 6 Gbps interface. The internal transfer rate is said to reach up to 268 MB/s which makes it the second fastest drive in the series, just behind the 18 TB version.

What makes the 20 TB SKU unique in the Red Pro series though is the inclusion of 64 GB of WD’s own iNAND flash. Western Digital’s iNAND could be considered a DRAM-less SSD in a single chip package and in this case, it’s used as a large chunk of cache for the hard drive. One other benefit of the OptiNAND technology according to WD is that up to 100 MB of data in the 512 MB DRAM write cache that the drive also has, can be flushed to the iNAND in case of an unexpected power cut to the drive. This could help save important data that is in transit during a worst case scenario and seems like a great addition to a hard drive that’s targeting NAS applications. The WD Red Pro 20 TB is on sale now for US$499.99.