WD 6TB HDD Consuming 6 Watts

WD, a Western Digital company, introduced new datacenter HDDs that deliver to today’s modern datacenter architects the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity 3.5-inch HDD available today.

The WD Re+ HDD family is the newest component of WD’s portfolio of high-capacity datacenter storage devices. Further expanding that portfolio will be 6TB capacities for WD’s WD Re and WD Se datacenter product lines, providing customers a spectrum of capabilities, tiered to their varied demands of application intensity, power optimization and cost efficiency.

In the modern datacenter, the TCO formula is comprised of capacity, price, power consumption and the relationships between these variables. The WD Re+ drive provides the most power efficient and high-intensity high-capacity platform available today.

With power consumption a primary consideration in today’s large web-scale cloud infrastructures, and the WD Re+ drive consuming only 6 watts for 6 TB, customers’ TCOs increase and savings for large deployments could be millions of dollars per year.

“Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern datacenter,” said Matt Rutledge, SVP of storage technology, WD. “With a leading watt-per-gigabyte ratio and the long-trusted reliability of the WD Re HDD platform, WD Re+ offers our customers having limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications. Massive, scale-out deployments must deliver tremendous value to customers across a range of applications, while providing a healthy return to the infrastructure owner. WD is focused on offering that value across its portfolio.”
 
The SATA 6Gb WD Re+ HDD family features a five-platter platform, which renders an optimal mix of low power consumption, high capacity, 24 x 7 x 365-reliability and affordability. Vibration tolerance and Mean Time To Failure (MTTF) are also key considerations in these applications. Re+ HDDs deliver 1.2 million hour MTTF, enhanced RAFF technology to increase vibration tolerance and a high-intensity workload and reliability rating of 550TB-per-year workload, the highest workload capabilities of any WD 3.5-inch HDD. The WD Re+ and stalwart  
 
WD’s Re platform now offers up to 6TB for demanding datacenter and cloud storage needs. They also are designed to handle up to 550TB per year in high-intensity datacenter applications. They offer SATA interface with up to 6Gb/s transfer rates and sustained sequential data rates of up to 225MB/s.

Other features with Re and Re+ products include:

• Vibration protection – Enhanced RAFF technology monitors the drive and corrects both linear and rotational vibration in real time. The result is a performance improvement in high-vibration environments over the previous generation of drives.
• Dual actuator technology – A head-positioning system with two actuators 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.
• 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.
• Multi-axis shock sensor – Automatically detects the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data.
• RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) – Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended HDD error-recovery processes common to desktop drives.
• NoTouch ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
• Thermal extended burn-in test – Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.
• Dynamic fly height technology – Each read-write head’s fly height is adjusted in real time for reliability.
• Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
• 3D Active Balance Plus – Enhanced dual-plane balance control technology improves the overall drive performance and reliability. HDDs that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in a multi-drive system, reduce the HDD life span, and degrade the performance over time.

The Se line of datacenter HDDs provide performance, reliability and capacity specifically designed for SMB to high-end NAS and large-scale datacenter replication environments running 24x7x365. Capacities range up to 6TB.

Shipping to customers for qualification Re+ drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty. Re and Se 6TB HDDs will be available for qualification next quarter.