Western Digital a leader in the desktop, mobile, high-capacity enterprise and consumer markets for hard drives, today announced the availability of its second-generation WD S25 SAS drives (photo) and its latest WD RE SAS 3.5-inch drives for the traditional enterprise market. Shipping now, the 2.5-inch, 10,000 RPM, WD S25 with SAS 6 Gb/s interface hard drives offer IT professionals ultra-reliable and efficient, high-performance storage with new 450 GB and 600 GB capacities. The WD S25 line, including the previously released 147 GB and 300 GB capacities, is designed for mission-critical server and storage systems.
Also shipping now to OEMs, the new 3.5-inch, 7,200 RPM, WD RE SAS with 6 Gb/s interface hard drives offer 1 TB and 2 TB capacity points, and represent a key addition to WD’s expanding enterprise product portfolio. The WD RE SAS drives mark an important commitment to the expansion of WD’s SAS portfolio for high-capacity data center storage, storage area networks (SAN), network attached storage (NAS), direct attach storage (DAS), networked surveillance systems and cloud storage.
“Meeting the demands of our customers and IT professionals in the enterprise market is the primary driver of our long-term commitment to SAS drives,” said Darwin Kauffman, WD’s vice president of enterprise storage solutions. “Our focused strategy in the enterprise continues to ensure that customers who have rewarded WD with their preference of WD drives in other application segments receive the same outstanding values of quality, reliability, performance and availability with WD’s SAS drives. It is with that commitment that we are now able to meet a wider set of customer requirements.”
“Over the past three years, SAS has established itself as the preferred interface for HDDs in servers and enterprise storage systems, representing more than 50 percent of all HDDs shipped for enterprise applications in 2010,” said John Rydning, research director, hard disk drives at IDC. “The performance, scalability, and reliability of SAS will result in more than two-thirds of HDDs shipping with a SAS interface for enterprise applications by 2014.”
