Western Digital is offering its second-generation WD S25 server-attached-storage drives and its latest WD RE server-attached-storage 3.5-inch drives for the traditional enterprise market.
Shipping now, the 2.5-inch, 10,000-rpm, WD S25 with SAS 6G bps interface hard drives offer IT professionals expanded storage with new 450GB and 600GB capacities. The WD S25 line, including the previously released 147GB and 300GB capacities, is designed for mission-critical server and storage systems. It was announced Jan. 18.
Features include RAFF (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward), which optimizes operation and performance when the drives are used in vibration-prone, multidrive chassis, and requires less than 8 watts to operate. NoTouch ramp-load technology assures the recording head never touches the disk media, and in addition to being compliant with ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) regulations, these drives also incorporate a halogen-free design. Like all the company’s enterprise-storage hard drives, WD S25 carry a standard five-year limited warranty worldwide.
Also shipping now to OEMs is the new 3.5-inch, 7,200 rpm, WD RE SAS with 6G bps interface hard drives, which offer 1TB and 2TB capacity points, and represent what the company called “a key addition” to WD’s expanding enterprise product portfolio. The company also said the WD RE SAS drives mark an important commitment to the expansion of WD’s SAS portfolio for high-capacity data center storage, SANs (storage area networks), NAS (network-attached storage), DAS (direct-attach storage), networked surveillance systems and cloud storage.
“Meeting the demands of our customers and IT professionals in the enterprise market is the primary driver of our long-term commitment to SAS drives,” Darwin Kauffman, Western Digital’s vice president of enterprise-storage solutions, said in a statement. “Our focused strategy in the enterprise continues to ensure that customers who have rewarded WD with their preference of WD drives in other application segments receive the same outstanding values of quality, reliability, performance and availability with WD’s SAS drives. It is with that commitment that we are now able to meet a wider set of customer requirements.”
John Rydning, research director of hard-disk drives at IDC, said that over the past three years, SAS has established itself as the preferred interface for HDDs (hard-disk drives) in servers and enterprise storage systems, representing more than 50 percent of all HDDs shipped for enterprise applications in 2010. “The performance, scalability and reliability of SAS will result in more than two-thirds of HDDs shipping with a SAS interface for enterprise applications by 2014,” he said.