Western Digital debuts 'world's most power-efficient' high-capacity 3.5-inch HDD for datacenters
Western Digital (WD) has introduced new datacenter hard drives that deliver 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. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6 terabyte capacities for the popular WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines, providing customers drives to cope with the varied demands of application intensity, power optimisation and cost efficiency.
With power consumption a primary consideration in today's large web-scale cloud infrastructures, and the WD Re+ drive consuming only 6 watts for 6 TB, customers' TCOs increase and savings for large deployments could be "millions of dollars per year" according to the company.
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"Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern datacenter," said 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, Western Digital 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, which renders an optimal mix of low power consumption, high capacity, 24 x 7 x 365-reliability and affordabilityWD Re+ hard drives deliver 1.2 million hours MTTF, enhanced RAFF technology to increase vibration tolerance and a high-intensity workload and reliability rating of 550 TB-per-year workload, the highest workload capabilities of any WD 3.5-inch hard drive.
The new WD Re+ and stalwart WD Re share a platform to simplify large-scale deployments and provide the reliability and performance customers have come to expect from WD's datacenter products.
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. The result is a significant performance improvement in high-vibration environments over the previous generation of drives.
- 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 processes common to desktop drives.
- 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 for optimum reliability.
- Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- 3D Active Balance Plus - Our enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly 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.
Shipping immediately to customers for qualification WD Re+ drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty. WD Re and WD Se 6 TB hard drives will be available for qualification next quarter.
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