Western Digital Raptor aims at enterprise

WESTERN DIGITAL IS THE ONLY MAJOR hard drive manufacturer without SCSI products to tap into the lucrative enterprise market. The enthusiast market is all well and good, but with Seagate and Maxtor launching Serial ATA drives combined with 8MB caches, WD faced the prospect of the loss of market share.

That all changed today as it announced an Enterprise Serial ATA (ESATA) product that will be known as the WD Raptor. The new hard drive offers system builders and storage vendors enterprise-class specifications, which we reported on last week here.

The specifications include a 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM, 8MB buffer, 5.2 ms average seek time, and a five-year warranty. This is competitive with 10K enterprise class SCSI drives, but at a significantly reduced cost. The WD Raptor hard drive is expected to sell for approximately 30 percent less than competing SCSI hard drives.

Serial ATA offers system level benefits in the enterprise environment, including point-to-point configuration, which utilizes the full bandwidth of each drive interface in a networked environment; scalability; hot-plug support for system design flexibility; and advanced error detection for data integrity.

The Raptor features a single 3" platter that stores 36.7 gigabytes. Built for reliability, it utilizes a rugged enterprise-class mechanical platform with high-end bearings and actuator. WD envisions the use of several of these drives in conjunction with an SATA RAID controller, such as those from 3ware. This makes for a low cost solution that can service the low to midrange enterprise storage sector. Future models with multiple platters and higher densities are expected.

"Over the last three years, Western Digital's business has progressed significantly," said Arif Shakeel, president and COO for Western Digital.

"Our entrance into the enterprise market marks the next step in our growth. With this announcement, Western Digital extends beyond our consistently profitable desktop market, and brings unique Western Digital know-how to the enterprise market. With exploding growth predicted, Western Digital is poised to continue to be an important player in the core of the rapidly growing storage marketplace."

The drives are expected to ship later this month, which means they will be available for sale in late March. µ

See Also:
Western Digital to launch consumer 10K RPM drives
Seagate unveils its own HAMR
Maxtor slashes warranties to one year from three
Hard drive makers soft pedal S-ATA cycle
Maxtor messes up on S-ATA, ATA drives
IBM to close Hungarian hard drive plant