WD® Maximizes Enterprise Storage With 4 TB WD RE SAS, WD RE SATA Hard Drives

IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 27, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- WD^®, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), and a leader in the mobile, desktop, high-capacity enterprise and consumer markets for hard drives today announced it is further expanding its enterprise-class storage offerings with the release of new WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives in capacities up to 4 TB, the largest on the market today. Available immediately in 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities for nearline SAS and 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB for SATA, the 3.5-inch WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives offer the powerful combination of enterprise-class features and superior capacity to meet the growing demands of conventional business-critical environments as well as the high-capacity and performance requirements of cloud and scale-out computing.

"Given the insatiable need for storage capacity across all market segments, WD is offering both SAS and SATA interfaces for the WD 4 TB RE hard drives to best support both private and public clouds," said Doug Pickford, senior director of business marketing for WD's enterprise business unit. "WD continues to pioneer the capacity-optimized 3.5-inch market segment, in particular, and the WD RE SAS and SATA 4 TB drives are designed, tested and optimized for enterprise storage and applications, enabling 33% greater capacity than previously available drives and up to 2.4 PB of raw capacity in a single enterprise rack."

"With the new 4 TB 7,200 hard disk drives from WD, the Dell PowerVault MD3 Array series will offer customers more storage capacity than ever before." said Brett Roscoe, general manager and executive director, PowerVault and data management solutions, Dell Storage. "The new 4 TB HDDs on our recently announced MD3 Dense arrays will allow our customers to store even more data in a compact form factor, with up to 240 TB of data storage in a single dense array and up to a maximum of 720 TB utilizing a single MD3 Dense array and two 60 disk MD3 expansion enclosures."

"High density storage, low power consumption, and reliability are crucial for Cloud, Big Data, and data center infrastructures and services," said Andy Morgan, senior director of Storage Platforms at Xyratex. "Through the early qualification of our partner's enterprise products like WD for compatibility with our own OneStor^TM solutions, we are providing our OEM customers a means to address these requirements and profit from these growing markets."

Features of the new WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives include:

• Dual port, full duplex connectivity: Ideal for leading business-critical enterprise topologies.
• 1.4M hours MTBF / 1.2M hours MTBF: Provides the highest level of reliability for 24x7 and up to 100% duty applications, for the WD RE SAS and SATA, respectively.
• Planet friendly: RoHS compliant, halogen reduced components.
• NoTouch™ ramp load technology: Recording heads never touch the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to recording heads and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
• Dual Stage Actuation (DSA) and Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF™): Best in class operation and performance when drives are used in vibration-prone, multi-drive chassis.
• Highest Capacity: Perfect for maximum capacity enterprise storage solutions, such as scale out, cloud storage, RAID arrays, and NAS; a massive 2.4 PB of available storage (with 10 4U, 60 bay enclosures).
• Highest Reliability: 5-disk platform, 800 GB per platter, SAS-interface, 6 Gb/sec transfer rates built for high performance 24x7.

Price and Availability

Available through select distributors and resellers, the 3.5-inch WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty. Additional information about WD RE SAS enterprise hard drives and limited warranty terms may be found on the company website at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=580 and WD RE SATA enterprise hard drives can be found at http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=30.

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.

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including statements relating to expected availability dates for 2, 3 and 4 TB WE RE SATA HDDs. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements, including uncertainties related to the development and introduction of products based on new technologies; supply and demand conditions in the hard drive industry; and other risks and uncertainties listed in Western Digital's recent SEC filings, to which your attention is directed. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak on as of the date hereof, and WD undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect subsequent events or circumstances.

Western Digital, WD, the WD logo and WD RE are registered trademarks in the U.S. and other countries; NoTouch and RAFF are trademarks of Western Digital Technologies, Inc. All other brand and product names mentioned herein are property of their respective companies. As used for storage capacity, one terabyte (TB) = one trillion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.

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SOURCE WD