WD, a Western Digital company and storage solutions provider, has introduced new datacenter hard drives that boast the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drive available today. The WD Re+ hard drive family is the newest component of WD’s portfolio of high-capacity datacenter storage devices and consumes 6 watts for 6 TB. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6 terabyte (TB) capacities for the company’s WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines.
“Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern datacenter,” says Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology at WD. “With a leading watt-per-gigabyte ratio and the long-trusted reliability of the WD Re hard drive platform, WD Re+ offers our customers having limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications. Massive, scale-out deployments must deliver tremendous value to customers across a range of applications, while providing a healthy return to the infrastructure owner. WD is focused on offering that value across its portfolio.”
The SATA 6 Gb/s WD Re+ hard drive family features a dense five-platter platform and a reliability rating of 550 TB-per-year workload. The new WD Re+ and stalwart WD Re share a platform to simplify large-scale deployments.
WD Re hard drives are also designed to handle up to 550 TB per year in high-intensity datacenter applications. They offer SATA interface with up to 6 Gb/s transfer rates and sustained sequential data rates of up to 225 MB/s.
Other datacenter-class features with the WD Re and WD Re+ products include:
- Vibration protection – Enhanced RAFF technology monitors the drive and corrects both linear and rotational vibration in real time.
- Dual actuator technology – A head-positioning system with two actuators improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). 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.
- StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
- Multi-axis shock sensor – Automatically detects the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data.
- RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) – Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery.
- NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
- Thermal extended burn-in test – Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.
- Dynamic fly height technology – Each read-write head’s fly height is adjusted in real time.
- Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- 3D Active Balance Plus – The enhanced dual-plane balance control technology improves the overall drive performance and reliability. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in a multi-drive system, reduce the hard drive life span, and degrade the performance over time.
The WD Se line of datacenter hard drives offer a blend of performance, reliability, and capacity specifically designed for SMB to high-end NAS and large-scale datacenter replication environments running 24x7x365. Capacities range up to 6 TB.
More information about WD’s datacenter hard drives can be found on the company website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/internal/enterprise/.
