WD announces 750 GB SATA hard drives

MUMBAI, MAHARASHTRA: Addressing the needs for the growing enterprise market for high-capacity, highly-reliable storage, Western Digital Corp. has announced that it will be shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 750 GB hard drive this month in the Indian market. With 3.0 GB/s data transfer rate, WD RE2 hard drives feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 16 MB cache for high system performance.

WD has continued to leverage its extensive experience from previous RAID Edition drives, to develop a hard drive perfectly suited for a variety of high-capacity enterprise applications. These drives demand high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features," said Sharad Srivastava, Sales Director, South Asia and India, Western Digital.

Addressing a growing high-capacity enterprise market, WD RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours mean time to failure (MTTF) in high duty cycle environments. Combined with a new 750 GB capacity, this provides enterprise-class drives with reliability and other required attributes for demanding server and network-attached storage environments, such as file servers, e-mail servers and Web servers.

Other proven features incorporated in the new WD RE2 750 GB hard drives include:

- SecurePark(TM) for improved shock characteristics

- StableTrac(TM) for improved vibration performance

- IntelliSeek(TM) to reduce power consumption, noise and vibration

WD RE2 750 GB hard drives include the company's SecurePark technology, which parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is not operating. Unlike drives without SecurePark, the feature improves non-operational shock tolerance by ensuring that the recording heads never touch the disk surface, reducing head and surface wear and enhancing long-term reliability.

Used on WD high-capacity hard drives and to further ensure reliability, WD's StableTrac technology was incorporated. StableTrac's motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations. Most current hard drive designs feature motors that are only attached on the bottom of the hard drive, which can cause missed read revolutions. StableTrac allows end-user data to be retrieved fast without missing revolutions.

CIOL Bureau