Western Digital, one of the world's most recognizable brands in the consumer storage market, has announced today the debut of its new WD S25-inch 2.5-inch traditional hard drive, featuring a SAS interface.

Designed for the traditional enterprise market segment, the new drive is the company's first SAS-based product, offering an alternative for users looking for a high-performance storage solution. At the same time, it is aimed at mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise storage applications, such as data centers and large data arrays.

“Our entry into the traditional-enterprise market continues the strategic expansion and diversification of WD's broad market and product portfolio, and significantly increases our addressable revenue opportunity,” said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. “As with our previous market expansion and diversification efforts, WD will approach the traditional enterprise space with the same focus on quality, customer service, technology and value that has earned us strong positions in every market we serve.”

According to the Lake Forest, California-based storage vendor, the WD S25 drive is capable of delivering a high level of performance, thanks to the adoption of the 3Gb/s and 6GB/s SAS interfaces. This enables the drive to deliver sustained sequential data rate of 128 MB/s. Furthermore, it can provide as much as 300GB of storage space and comes with a rated 10,000 RPM platter speed.

“We are thrilled to launch a mission-critical-class hard drive to these high-end OEM customers,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise storage solutions business unit. “This new family of SAS products adds to our existing large capacity SATA near-line enterprise product portfolio. This first product is the foundation upon which we will expand into the previously untapped traditional enterprise market.”

The drive is already available to select OEMs, and is shipping to the two largest OEMs in the industry, as Western Digital informs.