BIOS: Technology Means Business

Addressing a growing enterprise market for high capacity, highly reliable storage, Western Digital has announced it is now shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 500GB SATA hard disk drives (HDDs).

With 3.0Gbit/s data transfer rate, WD RE2 hard disk drives feature Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 16MB cache for improved performance in multi-user, random I/O environments. WD RE2 drives are designed for network attached storage, direct attached server storage and video surveillance environments that require 100 per cent 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 per cent between 2006 and 2009.

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.

The WD RE2 500GB should therefore be 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) maximises WD RE2 500GB 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 (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) technology, which provides best-in-class vibration tolerance by optimising 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 the WD RE2 500GB is $349 (£199). The WD Online Store is also currently offering for a limited time free shipping on orders over $200 (£115).

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