Storage specialist WD, a Western Digital company, introduced a line of data center hard drives that deliver low power consumption for high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drives.
The WD Re+ hard drive family is the newest component of WD’s tiered portfolio of data center storage devices. Further expanding that portfolio, will be 6 terabyte (TB) capacities for WD’s Re and Se data center product lines, tiered to various levels of application intensity and power optimization.
The WD Re+ drive consumes just 6 watts for 6 TB, and the SATA 6 Gb/s Re+ hard drive family features a dense five-platter platform.
“This is an entirely new design point,” Geoffrey Mershon, Datacenter BU, emerging markets director of product marketing for WD, told eWEEK. “WD has taken a fresh look at power optimization and developed a ground-up design that renders the industry’s absolute best power efficiency. There is considerable engineering to achieve that optimal profile. The major levers that render the power optimization include spin speed and data seek profiles.”
With vibration tolerance and Mean Time To Failure (MTTF), Re+ hard drives deliver 1.2 million hours MTTF, while enhanced rotary acceleration feed forward (RAFF) technology increases vibration tolerance.
This results in a reliability rating of 550 TB-per-year workload, the highest workload capabilities of any WD 3.5-inch hard drive, Mershon explained.
In addition, the Re+ and Re share a platform to help simplify large-scale deployments, while a head-positioning system with two actuators improves positional accuracy over the data tracks.
The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles, and the secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
Other features include RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), which prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives, and dual processors to improve performance.
Rounding out the package is NoTouch ramp load technology, which means the recording head never touches the disk media, ensuring less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
“In this modern information-based economy, businesses are in a race to amass the most possible unique data, as each piece of data has business value,” Mershon said. “Businesses are struggling to harness all the data they need to store. This trend is moving at an unprecedented pace, and the legacy infrastructures the industry used in the past are not appropriate for this scale of storage. Thus, entirely new software and hardware architectures are emerging to be the foundation for this massively deep data pool.”