WD® Designs First Enterprise-Class Hard Drives For Exploding Scale-Out Datacenter Market

IRVINE, Calif., May 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- WD^®, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company and world leader for storage deployed in datacenters, today announced availability of its innovative WD Se™ line of hard drives, the first designed for scale-out datacenter deployments. Built on an enterprise-grade platform for reliable 24x7x365 datacenter operation, WD Se is tailored to deliver the right combination of performance, reliability and robustness for large-scale replicated environments, mid-sized network attached storage (NAS) deployment, and backup/archiving applications.

WD Se is a true enterprise-class drive with the right blend of affordability and capabilities to address the massive growth of semi-structured data, which is accelerating the scale-out of datacenters of all sizes. Now shipping in capacities up to 4 TB, the new WD Se hard drives enables customers to balance their data growth challenges in multi-drive enclosures without compromising enterprise-class features.

"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," said Richard E. Rutledge, senior vice president of WD's datacenter storage business unit. "WD's utilization of vast amounts of manufacturing and engineering data has forced us – like many other companies – to use map-reduce 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^®."

WD Se drives also address the fast-growing SMB to mid-range network-attached storage (NAS) market. The robust enterprise-class design and higher workload capabilities for SMB-focused 6-bay-plus table-top NAS units and rack-mount multi-tenant NAS solutions with up to 24 bays, provide NAS integrators a complement to WD Red^™ hard drives, which are for small NAS systems. WD's other datacenter hard drives – WD Xe^™ and WD Re^™ – round out the high-end of the NAS market, offering higher durability and performance for large-scale rack-based NAS systems. Together, WD Se, WD Xe, WD Re and WD Red™ provide a total portfolio of robust storage devices to match every size and scale of NAS deployment.      

In addition to undergoing at least 5,000,000 hours of functional and thermal testing and over 20,000,000 hours of additional testing under actual workloads in server and storage systems, WD's Se hard drives feature:

• 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, and;
• Dynamic fly height technology where each read-write head's fly height is adjusted in real time for optimum reliability.

Price and Availability
WD's Se hard drives, shipping in capacities from 2 TB to 4 TB, (models: WD2000F9YZ, WD3000F9YZ, and WD4000F9YZ) are available through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD Se hard drives range from $159.99 to $309.99 USD. WD's Se drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty. More information about WD's Se enterprise hard drives may be found on the company's website at http://www.wd.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=1050.

About WD
WD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD's leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.wd.com.

Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), Irvine, Calif., is a global provider of products and services that empower people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Western Digital, WD, and the WD logo are registered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries; IntelliSeek, StableTrac and NoTouch are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. Other marks may be mentioned herein that belong to other companies. All other brand and product names mentioned herein are the property of their respective companies. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment. As used for transfer rate or interface, gigabit per second (Gb/s) = one billion bits per second.

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SOURCE WD