WD HAS ANNOUNCED its latest range of disks for cold storage, aimed at consigning tape libraries to history.
The WD Ae range is configured for data centre archiving and includes progressive capacity options, meaning that drives are available in granular capacities such that the capacities are available in increments, rather than the traditional terabyte jumps. For example, 6.2TB to 6.3TB is stated as an example of a typical jump.
With a high meantime before failure (MTBF) of 500,000 hours and a 60TB/year reliability rating, the Ae range is designed to be a workhorse for backing up the petabytes of data that pass through data centres every year, which is estimated to be 70-80 percent static.
"Cloud service providers have rapidly growing volumes of generally inactive data to store and manage, while at the same providing customers with access to the data at almost any time," according to John Rydning, IDC VP of hard disk drive research.
"WD's new WD Ae line of HDDs is aimed directly at these storage use cases, and is helping to define a new, active archive enterprise storage sub-segment, thus opening new HDD storage opportunities for the HDD industry."
Last week at an event in San Francisco, WD's sister company HGST revealed its own plans for cold storage products with its latest helium filled drive, the Helioseal He10, clocking in at 10GB using overlapping sectors and shingle magnetic recording to increase capacity.
Traditional tape archiving is still being investigated too, with a research team from IBM and Fujitsu having created tape with a density of 154GB per square inch earlier this year.
The WD Ae range is designed to kit out entire data centres, and as a result will be sold in boxes of 20 with shipping expected in late 2014. The drives are covered by a three year warranty. µ
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