Western Digital subsidiary WD, which specializes in hard drives and storage platforms for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) announced it is shipping what it claims to be the world’s thinnest 1TB hard drive with the release of the 2.5-inch WD Blue 7 mm hard drive.
The storage solution is designed to fit into thin and light systems, slimmer notebooks and offer compatibility with the industry-standard 9.5 mm drive slots of mainstream notebooks. The Blue hard drive family is available in capacities from 320GB to 1TB in the 7 mm height. Currently shipping through select distributors and resellers, the 1TB Blue mobile hard drive is covered by a two-year limited warranty, and the suggested price for the 1TB model is $139.
“Users with large portfolios of content no longer need an Ultrabook or upgrading to a thin and light notebook,” Matt Rutledge, vice president and general manager for client storage products at WD, said in a statement. “This most compact 1TB hard drive to date offers manufacturers of systems an upsell path for their customers, who will now be able to choose systems offering both sleek design and high capacity.”
Features include WD’s ShockGuard technology, which protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks, WhisperDrive technology that enables quiet performance and StableTrac, where the motor shaft is secured at both ends to compensate for system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations, which enables consistently higher performance.
In addition, the drive features dual sage actuators, which utilize two actuators to improve positional accuracy over the data tracks. The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine-tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
Finally, the company’s SecurePark technology parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off to ensure the recording head never touches the disk surface, offering improved long-term reliability due to less head wear and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
The company has been very active recently, with a slew of product launches, including the expansion of its product portfolio for midmarket companies with the addition of Sentinel RX4100, its first 1U rack-mount small business storage server. The Sentinel line is designed to function as a data protection solution and helps safeguard SMBs against data loss. The RX4100 comes with Microsoft Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials operating system and includes the software to back up 25 Windows and Mac OS client computers in the network.
Also in May, WD announced the launch of its Se line of hard drives, designed for scale-out data center deployments, midsize network attached storage (NAS) deployment, and backup and archiving applications. The Se line offers dual actuator technology to improve head positional accuracy over the data tracks, enhanced Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology that includes electronics to monitor the drive and correct both linear and rotational vibration in real time, and a dual processor to improve performance.
