WD delivers world’s most power-efficient high-capacity 3.5-inch HDD for modern datacenters

Western Digital has just introduced new datacenter hard drives that deliver to today’s modern datacenter architects 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 full, tiered portfolio of high-capacity datacenter storage devices. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6 terabyte (TB) capacities for WD’s popular WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines, providing customers a spectrum of capabilities, tiered to their varied demands of application intensity, power optimization and cost efficiency.

In the modern datacenter, the total cost of ownership (TCO) formula is comprised of capacity, price, power consumption and the relationships between these variables. The WD Re+ drive provides the most power efficient and high-intensity high-capacity platform available today.

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.

“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, 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, which renders an optimal mix of low power consumption, high capacity, 24 x 7 x 365-reliability and affordability. Vibration tolerance and Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) are also key considerations in these applications. WD Re+ hard drives deliver 1.2m 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.

WD’s award-winning WD Re platform now offers up to 6 TB for demanding datacenter and cloud storage needs. WD Re hard drives also are 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, delivering performance and reliability needed in any datacenter.

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.

The WD Se line of datacenter hard drives provide 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.

Availability
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.