September 1st, 2009
Western Digital debuts 2TB, 7200RPM enterprise-class hard drives
Western Digital on Tuesday announced that it is now shipping 2TB, 7200RPM enterprise-class desktop hard drives with WD’s 500 gigabytes-per-platter technology.
The company’s family of Caviar Black drives (pictured, below) is intended for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations; while the 2TB WD RE4 drive (pictured, top) is designed for servers, network attached storage and storage networks.
Both are high-performance drives, offering 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 3 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface and an integrated dual processor for performance.
For the Caviar Black drives, that means more horsepower for gaming, photo editing, video production and other multimedia.
For the enterprise-class RE4 drive, that means application speed, optimum performance and reliability.
Both the 2TB WD Caviar Black and 2TB WD RE4 hard drives feature the following, according to the company:
- Dual processor for performance
- Dual actuator technology: A head positioning system with two actuators that 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.
- IntelliSeek: Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise, and vibration.
- 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.
- 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.
As an enterprise-ready drive, the WD RE4 also features 1.2 million hours MTBF, Active Power Save, enhanced RAFF technology, multi-axis shock sensor, native command queuing (NCQ), pressure sensors, third generation dynamic fly height, time limited error recovery (TLER) and long-term reliability for enterprise applications.
The 2TB WD Caviar Black (model WD2001FASS) is available for $299.
The 2TB WD RE4 (model WD2003FYYS) drive is currently being qualified by OEMs.
Both drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty.
Andrew J. Nusca is an associate editor for ZDNet and SmartPlanet.
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