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New WD Re+ drives offer unprecedented power efficiency and larger storage capacities

By Koh Wanzi - on 12 Mar 2015, 10:01pm

New WD Re+ drives offer unprecedented power efficiency and larger storage capacities

Image Source: WD 

The quest to deliver faster, more efficient and reliable storage for enterprise needs is heating up, such as with HGST’s announcement last year that all its 3.5-inch drives will now be filled with helium. HGST’s own parent company WD has now kicked it up a notch with the announcement of the WD Re+ hard drives, which the company claims offer the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity 3.5-inch hard drive today.

With a power consumption of only 6 watts for a 6TB drive and an industry-leading watt-per-gigabyte ratio, WD is angling its new drives at the modern datacenter, for which a fine balance between capacity, price and power consumption is crucial. As the amount of data stored in the cloud continues to grow, power consumption has become a primary concern for today’s large web-scale cloud infrastructures. WD estimates that the Re+ drives’ enhanced power efficiency could drive total cost of ownership (TCO) down for enterprises and result in savings of millions of dollars for large deployments.

The Re+ drives are also geared toward budget-conscious businesses and enterprises who want access to industry-leading data storage solutions without breaking the bank. "WD Re+ offers our customers having limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications," says Matt Rutledge, WD’s senior vice president of storage technology. Tier-2 storage applications generally prioritize a balance between cost and performance, which seems to be what WD is aiming for.

In addition to a dense five-platter platform and a key combination of low power consumption, high capacity and round-the-clock reliability, the SATA 6Gbps WD Re+ hard drives also come with improved vibration tolerance and Mean Time to Failure (MTTF). The drives are rated for 1.2 million hours MTTF and a 550TB workload per year, the highest for a 3.5-inch drive from WD.

However, WD has not forgotten its older Re line of drives and is updating their storage capacity to 6TB to bring it in line with the Re+ drives. The new WD Re+ and WD Re will also share the same platform to facilitate large-scale deployments and deliver the reliability and performance customers demand.

WD Re+ drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty and begin shipping immediately to customers for qualification. For more information on WD’s datacenter hard drives, please visit WD’s company website.

Source: WD

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