Western Digital Targeting Enterprise Servers with SAS Hard Drives

Posted 11/03/2009 at 1:21pm | by Bart Salisbury

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Western Digital, the world’s second largest hard driver manufacturer and a favorite of the masses, has decided to play with the big boys, announcing their first hard drive for the enterprise storage market.

The enterprise market is made up of big business, which places heavy, mission critical demands on their hard drives. You need some serious hard drive storage if you plan to offer email, web applications, or cloud-computing services. Drives that can handle the stress long-term, with little chance of failure are favored in this market, currently dominated by Seagate and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Western Digital’s first offering is the WD S25, available in 147 Gb and 300 Gb capacities. The drive, which has a 2.5-inch form factor, spins at 10,000 RPMs. It also includes the technologically necessary Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, either SAS 3 Gb/s or SAS 6 Gb/s. While similar in appearance to Western Digital’s VelociRaptor, it has faster read and write seek times, and a higher MTBF rating of 1.6 million hours.

Image Credit: Western Digital