14 DAY TRIAL // Western Digital is commonly known as a hard drive manufacturer, with a great deal of success on their Raptor series of drives, also known as the fastest desktop drives. The company has withdrawn from the SCSI business some time ago, dedicating their services for the desktop segment and having many intrusions into the world of multimedia applications and video surveillance.
Into these last segments, Western Digital has introduced a new series of hard drives for audio and video recording products. The series is called WD AV and is comprised on 3.5-inch hard drives with capacities ranging from 80GB to 500GB, with 2 and 8MB of buffer memory on both EIDE and Serial ATA interfaces.
Jim Welsh, vice president and general manager, Branded Products and Consumer Business units said: "WD has been a high-volume supplier of best-in-class drives to our video recording OEM customers since the digital video recording market was in its infancy. As the market for drives designed specifically for these applications has expanded, so has the number of end-product manufacturers worldwide. The best way to serve this diverse and growing customer base is to offer our new WD AV drive directly and through our distribution network."
The practical applications for these drives are digital set-top boxes, personal video recorders, IP gateways and surveillance systems. WD's claim is that for these types of applications, the drives must operate under a 24x7 schedule, and their new series fits just for that particular need. The drives also incorporate WD's ramp load feature, which keeps the recording head in the "landing zone", the area where it stays during non-operating mode, even during the spin-up, spin-down and in non-operating mode, reducing power consumption and improving non-operational shock tolerance.
They have also integrated a technology called Preemptive Wear Leveling (PWL) which "sweeps the drive arm across the disk to reduce uneven wear on the disk surface"; IntelliSeek, a technology that calculates the "optimal seek speed", moving the actuator so that it reads the information constantly from one target sector to the next, as a contrary to desktop drives, which accelerate rapidly, and then have to wait for the drive rotation to catch up. Another technology integrated into these drives is the SilkStream Technology, which allows "as many as 12 simultaneous high-definition streams (assuming a host transfer block size of 2 MB per stream)."