Western Digital (WD) has unveiled its new range of high-capacity hard drives for data centers.
On Tuesday, March 10, the company introduced WD Re+, the 3.5-inch hard drive that not only boasts incredible capacity but also has the distinction of being the lowest power-consuming high-capacity drive.
"Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern data center," said Matt Rutledge, SVP 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 customers having limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications."
Rutledge believes that large "scale-out deployments" should not only cater to delivering good value to their customers but also persevere to provide good returns to the infrastructure owners. This philosophy is what Western Digital abides by and focuses on across its extensive portfolio.
With the new WD Re+ hard drive range targeted at data centers, each drive will be consuming only 6 watts for the 6TB of storage. This is quite a leap forward as power consumption is a major concern for many data centers. With only 6 watts of consumption for a major storage space in the TCO model, companies could save millions every year vis-à-vis the traditional model, which commands a price on the basis of each gigabyte.
The good thing about the WD Re+ hard drive family is that it offers Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward vibration protection. It also has a five-platter platform, which basically ensures low consumption of power and high capacity storage. Moreover, it is reliable and affordable.
"WD Re+ is designed to handle heavy workloads of up to 550TB per year in high-intensity, always-on datacenter applications. These drives deliver power efficiencies and reliability to any datacenter environment," noted the company.
The hard drive also boasts Dual Actuator technology, which ensures that the drive head is placed precisely. It also houses a shock sensor, which is multi-axis, a StableTrac dual motor shaft, as well as a NoTouch ramp load, which ensures that wear and tear of the drive head is minimal.
The WD Re+ family of hard drives will also tout a dual processor, as well as a 3D Active Balance Plus, which boasts the dual-plane balance technology that reduces the vibrations and noise.
The drives comes with a five-year warranty and will be immediately available for shipping to "customers for qualification."
