Western Digital Corp. has announced that it has doubled the capacity of its next-generation 10,000 RPM WD Raptor® enterprise Serial ATA (SATA) hard drive to 150 GB and has increased the performance of the popular drive with additional features for server and networked storage applications.
Enterprise storage system vendors are increasingly embracing SATA hard drives as a reliable and cost-effective choice for servers and storage systems. When WD originally introduced the WD Raptor – its first SATA drive – in 2003, approximately 14 per cent of hard drives used in multi-user applications were SATA technology, according to Gartner. The market research firm expects that portion to grow to 30 per cent by 2009.
“WD continues to lead the industry with the broadest enterprise SATA lineup. WD Raptor delivers enterprise reliability and performance, and the company’s RAID Edition drives – WD Caviar RE and WD Caviar RE2 – deliver enterprise capacity and reliability,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage for WD. “Building on customer demand and market adoption for enterprise SATA drives, the 10,000 RPM WD Raptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives available.”
The new, 150 GB WD Raptor maintains its high performance in servers and networked storage, where rotational vibration from multiple spinning hard drives robs performance, with its RAFF™ (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology. The next-generation drive also offers best-in-class random I/O performance with native command queuing (NCQ), which increases performance by intelligently ordering multiple simultaneous read and write commands, which is common in demanding, multi-user workloads such as servers. Sixteen MB cache furthers the drive’s ability to serve and record data quickly for multiple users. The drive offers an average seek time of 4.6 milliseconds (ms).
The enterprise-class mechanical and electronics platform of WD Raptor is designed to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment. Continuing to be the world’s most reliable SATA hard drive, WD Raptor is reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments and is backed by a five-year warranty.
Additional information about WD Raptor 150 GB hard drives may be found on the company's website at: http://www.westerndigital.com/products.
About Western Digital (WD):
WD, one of the storage industry’s pioneers and long-time leaders, provides products and services for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information. The company’s core business produces reliable, high-performance hard drives that keep users’ data close-at-hand and secure from loss.
WD was founded in 1970. The company’s storage products are marketed to leading systems manufacturers and selected resellers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. Visit the Investor section of the company’s website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.
