WD has announced its WD Ae line of hard drives designed for the unique operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within web-scale datacenters. WD Ae drives are purpose-built archive HDDs with extreme areal density on a high volume mechanical platform, operating with the lowest possible power consumption possible while using a Progressive Capacity model to enable a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud infrastructures.
WD has announced its WD Ae line of hard drives designed for the unique operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within web-scale datacenters. WD Ae drives are purpose-built archive HDDs with extreme areal density on a high volume mechanical platform, operating with the lowest possible power consumption possible while using a Progressive Capacity model to enable a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud infrastructures.
The WD Ae hard drive family is purpose-built with cost-optimized cold data storage (important information not frequently accessed for long periods of time) infrastructure, allowing IT departments to deliver vastly improved time-to-archive and time-to-retrieve cold/archive data. In addition, they consist of unique features such as: a dense five-platter platform, which renders an optimal mix of power, performance, capacity and cost; capacities greater than 6TB; SATA 6 Gb/s interface; and a workload and reliability rating of 60 TB/yr workload and 500 Khrs Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF).
WD’s innovative Progressive Capacity model allows distribution of incrementally higher capacity models to take advantage of their fullest available storage; for example, 6.1 TB, 6.2 TB, or 6.3 TB. These more granular capacity increments result in significantly better capacity attainment through the life of a product platform. At the massive scale of modern applications, the availability of incremental capacity each quarter offers useful value to datacenters who have the ability to realize improvements in capacity-per-drive, capacity-per-volumetric space and reduced infrastructure overhead.
What Progressive Capacity means is that WD can use odd-formatted platters in drives in boxes of 20 drives to hit a specific capacity point, like 1PB. The capacity of the drives within that box to hit a 1PB target are somewhat irrelevant, data centers looking at this class of drive often are not using RAID and are more concerned about capacity in a specific footprint. Those in RAID environments may ask for specific minimum capacity points within a 20-drive box, which WD aims to accommodate.
Availability
WD Ae hard drives will be sold in box quantities of 20 to select distributors and integrators starting sometime in late 2014. All WD Ae drives are backed by a three-year limited warranty.
