Pro Tools with a WD Red Drive

[Dizzi45Z]

I'm looking to find the largest hard drive possible to store all my old projects.

I currently have a 14 TB WD "Easy Store" Drive that is being backed up to the cloud that has all of my old projects on them and easy access for when clients need to access old projects (this is redundant from the original drives they were recorded on). It is just about full and I'm considering getting a 22 TB Red drive to put in My Mac Pro to store these projects with easy access to them. I would still be running all of my current sessions on my NVME drives, but when I do need to access old projects, I would want them to be able to easily run off of the drive.

Has anyone considered or used a WD Red drive for Pro Tools projects? Are they loud in these large capacities? Is there a reason why a network drive can't be used like a regular hard drive?

It would be awesome to be able to have 22 TB of Storage inside my Mac Pro.

[BScout]

As storage drives, it's fine to use.
As for noise, you have to look up the exact specific model on WD's site for sound. There can be a lot of variety (due to how the platters are cushioned, etc) is sound levels which is why you need to look up the specific model and not the general line.
And if using the drive to only store/archive projects, I'd let it sleep in the macOS power settings to minimize noise (the NVMe, of course, doesn't get affected by that.) There will be some latency when "waking" up the drive but the benefit of having it powered down when not in use might be worth that.

[Tweakhead]

I've not had a good experience with WD drives in recent years. They used to be fantastic. Then one died with unrecoverable problems before a week was up. I'll never buy them again. WD got sued for "faking" people into believing they were getting CMR in their enterprise level drives. They were in fact SMR.

Read up on CMR vs SMR type drives. SMR is garbage. G-Tech drives used to be good before they got bought out by WD and started putting crap mechanisms in the casing.

This Seagate IronWolf Pro 16TB CMR is what I now use for massive archival drives.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Dizzi45Z

I would still be running all of my current sessions on my NVME drives, but when I do need to access old projects, I would want them to be able to easily run off of the drive.

Nobody can guarantee stuff will work OK off a HDD. It depends on your setup and sessions. A modern NVMe SSD has orders of magnitude lower latency under heavy I/O load than the fastest HDD. If a HDD could work as well as the NVMe SSD then we'd all be buying HDD not NVMe SSDs.

With a suitably large Pro Tools disk cache, and if you let the session load into the cache, you may get away with anything. Try it and see if it works reliably enough for you... but the real answer is if you want to work on a session with most reliability you would copy it from the slow old HDD to the unbelievably fast NVMe SSD.

As for "Network Drive" the positioning of these drives by WD as "Network Drives" is largely marketing.

Sounds like you are being cautious but I'd be extra careful if you rely on one vendor/system for backup. e.g. WD Cloud stuff (which I've never used)... what happens if their cloud software goes bezerk and eats both your local copy and the copy in the cloud. Having your archives online on local storage can also increase the risk of user caused damage or data loss (the leading cause of data loss to start with) and if you say delete or corrupt sessions be careful that your cloud and other backup software just does not then delete or copy the corrupted session over your other backups. I'm a big fan of keeping archives online read-only on NAS storage as well as offline in cloud and removed disk storage (that can't be easily accidentally damaged). If I had archives online they would all be set read-only and deliberately not usable by Pro Tools until they were copied to say a working NVMe SSD.