14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital just announced that a new enterprise class line of hard disk drives will become available through resellers. The main product of this line is the WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 750 GB that features Native Command Queuing (NCQ) and 16 MB cache for the high system performance needed by the enterprise class.
"WD has continued to leverage its extensive experience from previous RAID Edition drives, to develop a hard drive perfectly suited for a variety of high-capacity enterprise applications. These drives demand high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage, Western Digital. Because of the ever increasing demands placed on the hard drives, the RE2 750GB, model number WD7500AYYS, is rated at 1.2 million hours MTTF (mean time to failure) in heavy duty environments. Aside from this, other features have been incorporated into the new WD RE2 750 GB hard drives.
SecurePark aims to improve the hard drive's ability to cope with shocks by parking the read/write heads away while they are spinning up, spinning down and during non-operational times. Keeping the heads away from the platter during these times helps improve reliability by ensuring that the platter cannot be scratched and damaged. StableTrac is another technology employed by Western Digital in order to decrease vibration inside the drive casing and improve the accuracy of head tracking during read and write operations on the drive. IntelliSeek is a "just in time" method used to increase the energy efficiency of the drive, as it is moving the heads in such a way that they arrive at the right sector on the disk just before they are needed to read or write on that particular sector.
Native Command Queuing, or NCQ for short, is a recently developed technology that allows the hard disk drive to increase the efficiency of reading and writing data on its platters. It does this by reordering the commands as they come and assigning each of them a priority. The WD7500AYYS is a 7200RPM drive and includes a five-year limited warranty.