Western Digital RE 500GB SATA HDD launched

Addressing a growing enterprise market for high capacity, highly reliable storage, Western Digital today announced it is now shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 500 GB SATA hard drives. With 3.0 Gb/s data transfer rate, WD RE2 hard drives feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 16 MB cache for improved performance in multi-user, random I/O environments. WD RE2 hard drives are designed for network attached storage, direct attached server storage and video surveillance environments that require 100 percent duty cycle and carry a 5-year limited warranty.

The demand for high capacity, highly reliable storage continues to grow. According to market research firm Gartner, the number of EIDE or ATA/SATA terabytes shipped into multi-user servers and storage systems is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 30.7 percent between 2006 and 2009. (Gartner Dataquest, September 2005)

Addressing this growing market, WD RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments. These new enterprise-class drives provide high reliability and performance in demanding server and network-attached storage for online applications such as file servers, e-mail servers, database servers, Web servers, video surveillance and scientific computing. WD RE2 500 GB is ideal for nearline applications such as virtual tape libraries (VTL), disk-to-disk backup, nearline content addressable storage and tiered storage environments.

Pioneered by WD, Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER) maximizes WD RE2 500 GB reliability in the enterprise by significantly reducing drive fallout from extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives. WD RE2 hard drives also employ RAFF(TM) (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) technology, which provides best-in-class vibration tolerance by optimizing operation and performance when the drives are used in servers and storage arrays where rotational vibration robs performance.

WD RE2 500 GB (model WD5000YS) hard drives are currently shipping in volume. Estimated pricing for WD RE2 500 GB is $349.99 USD. The WD Online Store is also currently offering for a limited time free shipping on orders over $200 USD.