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WD releases 4TB enterprise drives, again

WD adds two new 4TB drives to join the HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 unveiled last spring

September 27, 2012 03:30 PM ET

Computerworld - Western Digital Thursday unveiled an upgraded line of 1TB to 4TB 3.5-in hard drives for data centers.

WD had released another 4TB enterprise hard drive, the Ultrastar 7K4000 made by its Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) unit, in April.

WD completed its acquisition of HGST, now known as Viviti Technologies Ltd., in March

WD today expanded its enterprise-class storage offerings with the release of new WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives that offer capacities of up to 4 TB, said to be the highest available capacity today.

The RE drives are available in 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities for nearline SAS (serial-attached SCSI) and 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB for drives based on the lower-performance SATA (serial ATA) specification.

The RE SAS drives have a sustained sequential data transfer rate of up to 182 MB/s, while the RE SATA drives have a sustained sequential data transfer rate of up to 171 MB/s.

Like the Ultrastar 7K4000 line, the new RE SAS and SATA 4TB drives, contain five 800GB platters.

Both the SAS and SATA drive products use the latest 6Gbps-interface specification.

Unlike the Ultrastar drives, the new RE SAS and SATA drives do not have a native encryption option. WD said it would be offering encryption on the RE SAS model in the future.

"The WD RE SAS and SATA 4 TB drives are designed, tested and optimized for enterprise storage and applications, enabling 33% greater capacity than previously available drives and up to 2.4 PB of raw capacity in a single enterprise rack," Doug Pickford, a senior director of business marketing for WD, said in a statement.

Dell is one of WD's resellers offering the new drives in its PowerVault MD3 arrays, offering up to 240TB of capacity in a single array.

The new RE SAS and RE SATA drives offer a 1.4 million and 1.2 million hour mean time before failure, respectively. The 3.5-inch WD RE SAS and RE SATA hard drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty.

The new RE drives pricing schedule follows:

  • 4TB RE SAS drive: $479
  • 3TB RE SAS drive: $369
  • 2TB RE SAS drive: $249
  • 1TB RE SAS drive: $139
  • 4TB RE SATA drive: $459
  • 3TB RE SATA drive: $349
  • 2TB RE SATA drive: $229

Lucas Mearian covers storage, disaster recovery and business continuity, financial services infrastructure and health care IT for Computerworld. Follow Lucas on Twitter at Twitter@lucasmearian, or subscribe to Lucas's RSS feed Mearian RSS. His e-mail address is lmearian@computerworld.com.

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