New WD Re+ Hard Drive Offers 6 TB While Consuming Only 6 Watts

Western Digital has introduced a new data centre hard drive with high-capacity and low power consumption. The WD Re+ hard drive family is the newest component of WD’s portfolio that further got expanded with 6TB capacities for WD’s popular Re and Se product lines.

The WD Re+ drive provides the most power efficient and high-intensity high-capacity platform available today, it only consumes 6 watts for 6 TB. The WD Re+ hard drive family features a dense five-platter platform, which renders an optimal mix of low power consumption, high-capacity, 24 x 7 x 365-reliability and affordability.

“Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern datacenter,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology at WD. “With a leading watt-per-gigabyte ratio and the long-trusted reliability of the WD Re hard drive platform, WD Re+ offers our customers having limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications. Massive, scale-out deployments must deliver tremendous value to customers across a range of applications, while providing a healthy return to the infrastructure owner. WD is focused on offering that value across its portfolio.”

The drives have a 1.2m hours MTTF and enhanced RAFF technology to increase vibration tolerance. The reliability rating of 550 TB-per-year workload is the highest of any WD 3.5-inch hard drive.

• Vibration protection – Enhanced RAFF™ technology monitors the drive and corrects both linear and rotational vibration in real time. The result is a significant performance improvement in high vibration environments over the previous generation of drives.
• Dual actuator technology – A head positioning system with two actuators improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
• StableTrac™ – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
• 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.
• NoTouch™ ramp load technology – The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
• Thermal extended burn-in test – Each drive is put through extended burn-in testing with thermal cycling to ensure reliable operation.
• Dynamic fly height technology – Each read-write head’s fly height is adjusted in real time for optimum reliability.
• Dual processor – Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
• 3D Active Balance™ Plus – Our enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly improves the overall drive performance and reliability. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in a multi-drive system, reduce the hard drive life span, and degrade the performance over time.

The new Re+ drives have started to ship and should be available shortly while the WD Re and Se 6TB model will be available next quarter. The Re+ drives are also covered by a five-year warranty

Thanks to WD for providing us with this information