Two WD Enterprise 6Gb SAS HDDs

Western Digital Corp. announced the availability of its second-generation WD S25 SAS drives and its latest WD RE SAS 3.5-inch drives for the enterprise market.

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Shipping now, the 2.5-inch, 10,000 RPM, WD S25 with SAS 6 Gb/s interface hard drives offer IT professionals reliable and efficient, high-performance storage with new 450 GB and 600 GB capacities. The WD S25 line, including the previously released 147 GB and 300 GB capacities, is designed for mission-critical server and storage systems.

Also shipping now to OEMs, the new 3.5-inch, 7,200 RPM, WD RE SAS with 6 Gb/s interface hard drives offer 1 TB and 2 TB capacity points, and represent an addition to WD’s enterprise product portfolio. The WD RE SAS drives mark a commitment to the expansion of WD’s SAS portfolio for high-capacity data center storage, storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), direct attach storage (DAS), networked surveillance systems and cloud storage.

"Meeting the demands of our customers and IT professionals in the enterprise market is the primary driver of our long-term commitment to SAS drives," said Darwin Kauffman, WD’s vice president of enterprise storage solutions. "Our focused strategy in the enterprise continues to ensure that customers who have rewarded WD with their preference of WD drives in other application segments receive the same outstanding values of quality, reliability, performance and availability with WD’s SAS drives. It is with that commitment that we are now able to meet a wider set of customer requirements."

"Over the past three years, SAS has established itself as the preferred interface for HDDs in servers and enterprise storage systems, representing more than 50 percent of all HDDs shipped for enterprise applications in 2010," said John Rydning, research director, hard disk drives at IDC. "The performance, scalability, and reliability of SAS will result in more than two-thirds of HDDs shipping with a SAS interface for enterprise applications by 2014."

WD’s latest product offering provides a spectrum of SAS drives to fit specific enterprise needs. The WD S25 family of drives delivers high performance with its 6 Gb/s SAS interface and is fit for use in a broad range of mission-critical applications including dense server and storage systems. WD RE SAS hard drives are engineered to offer data-hungry SAS-based storage systems the massive capacity they need without compromising top-of-the-line performance.

Comments

Nobody can beat Seagate in enterprise HDDs since a long time. They represent only 4% to 5% of the total market of disk drives but Seagate is largely the leader with roughly two third of the worldwide share, Hitachi GST with one fourth, then Toshiba with the remaining. WD is a poor player in this field even if the company has invested in enterprise units since a long time with the VelociRaptor, more for workstations than for enterprise applications with its SATA interface.

For Seagate, it will even be difficult to increase substantially its market share because OEMs always want second source.

But WD continues to be there with SAS HDDs - no FC -, the new ones at 6Gb/s, but no one at 15,000rpm. The former WD S25, launched in November 2009 was at 147GB and 300GB, now with three platters and six heads at 450GB and 600GB, capacities reached by Seagate and Toshiba last year with the same interface, rotational speed and height (15mm).

The 1TB and 2TB WD RE at 7,500rpm are more nearline devices for SAS subsystems.