WD to offer businesses repackaged consumer drives

Hard disk manufacturer Western Digital (WD) has announced it to repackage the consumer version of its VelociRaptor serial ATA (SATA) 3.5in hard drives, in a 2.5in form factor. The resulting drive will be aimed at the enterprise blade and low-end rack server markets.

Although large arrays of relatively inexpensive SATA drives are used by many enterprise storage providers, the serial attached SCSI (SAS) drive is the one normally seen by enterprises as giving better performance when disk access is needed 24/7

WD's new SATA package has an estimated mean time between failure (MTBF) of 1.4 million hours said WD's enterprise storage solutions business unit general manager Tom McDorman. "In the server market, demand for high-performance drives continues to shift from the 3.5" form factor to the enterprise 2.5" form factor.”

The enterprise VelociRaptor drive comes in 150GB or 300GB versions, runs at 10,000 rpm and has a 3Gbit/s SATA interface, giving a sustained data transfer speed of 126MB/s. The VelociRaptor also comes with what WD call Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology, for optimising drive performance in multi-drive chassis, prone to vibration.

See also:

Seagate extends drive capacities

First 1.5TB desktop drives coming in August  11 Jul 2008

Hard disk makers aim for speed bump

Seagate and Western Digital line up new drives  03 Jun 2008

Flash drives scale to 128GB

Samsung and BitMicro Networks unveil new products at CES  09 Jan 2008

Flash memory to rival hard drives

The latest Flash memory chips may prove a viable substitute for hard disks in power-critical applications  12 Jan 2006

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