As businesses demand ever more storage drives to fill the volumes of information they generate and receive, Western Digital, a provider of data storage solutions, announced the expansion of its enterprise-class storage offerings with the WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives in capacities up to 4TB. The 3.5-inch drives are also offered with 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB and 3TB versions for the SATA appliances and 1TB, 2TB and 3TB versions for the SAS configuration. All drives are backed by a five-year limited warranty.
Both drives offer dual port, full duplex connectivity, Dual Stage Actuation (DSA) and Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) for improved operation and performance when drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis, and the company’s NoTouch ramp load technology, which means recording heads never touch the disk media, helping to ensure less wear to recording heads and media as well as better drive protection in transit. On the green technology side, the drives meet Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive compliance, through the use of halogen-reduced components.
“Given the insatiable need for storage capacity across all market segments, WD is offering both SAS and SATA interfaces for the WD 4TB RE hard drives to best support both private and public clouds,” Doug Pickford, senior director of business marketing for WD’s enterprise business unit, said in a prepared statement. “WD continues to pioneer the capacity-optimized 3.5-inch market segment, in particular, and the WD RE SAS and SATA 4TB drives are designed, tested and optimized for enterprise storage and applications, enabling 33 percent greater capacity than previously available drives and up to 2.4PB of raw capacity in a single enterprise rack.”
The drives deliver 6 gigabit per second (Gb/s) transfer rates, sustained sequential data rates of up to 182 MB/s and high random input/output (I/O) rates and have been field-tested for a 1.2 million hour mean time between failure (MTBF) rate. The WD RE SAS and SATA drives are compatible with Microsoft’s Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, Windows server, Linux, and Apple’s Mac OS platforms, according to a company information sheet.
“High density storage, low power consumption, and reliability are crucial for cloud, big data and data center infrastructures and services,” Andy Morgan, senior director of storage platforms at storage equipment specialist Xyratex, said in a press release. “Through the early qualification of our partner’s enterprise products like WD for compatibility with our own OneStor solutions, we are providing our OEM customers a means to address these requirements and profit from these growing markets.”