WD announces most reliable 400GB Serial ATA HDD

Western Digital introduced the most reliable high capacity Serial ATA (SATA) hard drives for server and network-attached storage applications. Reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments, WD Caviar(R) RE2 (RAID Edition) 400 GB hard drives are designed from the ground up to deliver enterprise reliability.

The demand for high capacity, high reliability storage is rapidly growing. According to market research firm Gartner, the number of EIDE or ATA/SATA terabytes shipped into multi-user servers and storage systems will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 54 percent between 2005 and 2009. (Market Share and Forecast: Hard Disk Drives Worldwide, 2000-2009, John Monroe, April 2005)

Meeting the 24x7 demands of enterprise environments, WD Caviar RE2 hard drives employ RAFF(TM) (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology, which maintains drive performance in servers and storage arrays where rotational vibration robs performance. Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), a unique WD feature, maximizes WD Caviar RE2 reliability in the enterprise by coordinating error handling with RAID controllers to help prevent drive fallout caused by extended desktop hard drive error-recovery processes.

Boosting performance on the 7,200 RPM WD Caviar RE2 is Native Command Queuing (NCQ), 16 MB cache and 8.7 milliseconds (ms) average seek time. Like all WD enterprise-class hard drives, WD Caviar RE2 is supported with a 5-year warranty.

"The transition of enterprise infrastructure to serial interfaces is accelerating due to the proven maturity of SATA and the emerging deployment of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)," said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president and general manager of WD's Computing Components Group. "Building on the market adoption of WD Caviar RE and WD Raptor(R), the next-generation WD Caviar RE2 400 GB demonstrates our unique ability to deliver what our enterprise customers demand: high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features."

"WD Caviar RE2 400 GB represents a significant milestone in the development of the blended SATA-SAS enterprise architecture," said Joe Leader, senior director of channel marketing and business development for LSI Logic storage adapters. "For the first time, SAS offers a storage ecosystem that interconnects seamlessly with next-generation SATA hard drives. The highly reliable, high capacity WD Caviar RE2 is an exceptional complement to LSI Logic's MegaRAID SATA 300-8X and MegaRAID SAS products. The market demand for hard drives with both high capacity and high reliability is already large and growing, and the timing with next generation SATA and SAS could not be better."

WD Caviar RE2 400 GB (model WD4000YR) hard drives began shipping this month and will be shipping in volume next month. Estimated street pricing for WD Caviar RE2 is $289 USD.