Western Digital now releases HDDs with CMR under WD Red Plus name

Western Digital has announced it will clarify its WD Red lineup. The company does this after criticizing its use of SMR. HDDs with SMR are released under the WD Red name. HDDs with CMR are moving to the new WD Red Plus series.

Western Digital announces the name change on its blog. The company is doing this after criticizing its use of Shingled Magnetic Recording for some WD Red HDDs. Use of this technique may adversely affect I/O performance.

The WD Red Plus series partly consists of the HDDs from the regular WD Red series that already used CMR. This includes drives with capacities of 8TB or more. The WD Red HDD with a capacity of 1TB already used CMR. In addition, the company reports that WD Red Plus HDDs in capacities from 2TB to 6TB with CMR “will be available soon.”

HDDs in the WD Red Plus lineup are aimed at home users and small businesses that have more write-intensive workloads, according to the company. These HDDs are also more suitable for use with the zfs file system.

All hard drives in the regular WD Red series will now use SMR, including possible future HDDs in this series. The WD Red Pro HDDs, which the company says are intended for “large companies”, remain unchanged, the company reports. Those HDDs all use CMR.

It is still unclear when Western Digital will release the WD Red Plus HDDs with capacities from 2 to 6TB. The suggested retail prices of these HDDs are not yet known.