Western Digital unveils WD Se line of enterprise-grade hard drives

Early Tuesday morning Western Digital announced a new line of hard drives that is specifically designed for scale-out datacenter deployments. Western Digital says that the WD Se line is the first hard drives to be specifically designed for this specific market.

The new drives are built on an enterprise-grade platform designed for reliable 24x7x365 datacenter operation. The drives were tested to five million hours of functional and thermal testing and over 20 million hours of additional testing while being under an actual workload in server and storage systems environments.

Western Digital had the following to say about the new WD Se line:

"Today's cloud datacenter installations require a cost-effective way to build large-scale storage systems, while maintaining the 24x7 reliability necessary to minimize total cost of ownership. "WD's utilization of vast amounts of manufacturing and engineering data has forced us like many other companies to use mapreduce methodologies to effectively analyze our data. The WD Se hard drives are used in our own big datacenter, where we have gained real-world experience with Apache Hadoop."

The new drives have begun shipping in three models (WD2000F9YZ, WD3000F9YZ and WD4000F9YZ) that range from 2TB to 4TB capacities, MSRP for the new WD Se drives range from $159.99 to $309.99 for the 4TB model. Western Digital says the drives are available now through select distributors and resellers.

For those of you who are interested in the new WD Se line's other features, I have listed them below.

• A dual processor for twice the processing power to maximize performance;
• Enhanced Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology that includes sophisticated electronics to monitor the drive and correct both linear and rotational vibration in real-time;
• Dual actuator technology improves head positional accuracy over the data track(s);
• StableTrac whereby the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations delivering a consistent level of performance for applications;
• Multi-axis shock sensor automatically detects the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data;
• RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives
• Dynamic fly height technology where each read-write head's fly height is adjusted in real-time for optimum reliability.