Western Digital’s Enterprising Drives

By Greg McNevin

September 5, 2007: Western Digital has boosted its line of enterprise drives with the announcement that it is now shipping its 750GB RE2 RAID edition hard drives.

With the new drives WD is boasting data transfer rates of 3.0 Gb/s, Native Command Queing (NCQ) and a 16MB cache to aid performance. The drives also take advantage of WD’s latest green technology, including IntelliSeek which controls the actuator’s movement to ensure it reaches the next piece of data just in time, rather than accelerating hard and then waiting for the disk to catch up.

WD says this reduces power consumption by up to 60 percent compared to standard drives, as well as cutting vibration, noise and heat levels to further prolong the drives life and reduce the energy required for cooling in data centres.

Cutting drive power consumption has been a priority for WD, particularly considering it’s membership to the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, which is aiming to reduce PC power consumption by 50 percent by 2010.

WD says that cutting overall power use means re-engineering storage, and that means new technologies such as IntelliSeek.

“The problem that we have today is you can't bring down PC power consumption by 50% unless you do something with the hard drive,” Ted Deffenbaugh, Western Digital’s Senior Director of Marketing Desktop Storage told IDM. “Most notebooks will pull about 50 - 60% of 50 watts. Most hard drives can pull up to 10 watts, while the larger ones pull up to 14 watts. This makes 30% of the budget spent powering the storage.”

When it comes to servers (which are basically just hard disks and CPUs), Deffenbaugh claimed that the hard disk literally draws 60 to 80 percent of the power.

“We do believe that the new architecture saves around 4 to 5 watts that competing drives in a 1TB drive,” he said.

This has to be the most impactful product I've seen released in the last 10 years. The green movement is here to stay,” said Deffenbaugh. “People want to double dip and they can with this product.”

WD’s RE2 drives are reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTTF (mean time to failure) in high duty cycle environments. The company says that this combined with 750GB of storage creates enterprise-class drives perfect for demanding server and network-attached storage environments.

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