WD hopes biz barons will grab its new 4TB data tubs
Drives are Western Digital's 'largest'
Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery
WD has added two mainstream 4TB enterprise disk drives to its range, with Xyratex and Dell using them straight away.
Basically it looks like the same 3.5-inch format drive mechanics with either a 6Gbit/s SAS or SATA interface. The RE SAS is available in 1TB, 4TB, 3TB and 4TB capacity points, with the RE SAS coming in 2GB, 3TB and 4TB versions. They use five 800GB platters and the spin speed is 7,200rpm.
The heads use dual-stage actuators to follow the tiny tracks better. The RE SAS has a 1.4 million hours mean time before failure (MTBF) rating with the SATA version having 1.2 million hours.
Dell's Brett Roscoe, general manager and exec director for PowerVault and other stuff at Dell, said that the PowerVault MD3 array will use the drives "with up to 240 TB of data storage in a single dense array and up to a maximum of 720 TB utilising a single MD3 Dense array and two 60 disk MD3 expansion enclosures.”
WD says an array with ten 4U 60-bay enclosures would have a 2.4PB capacity with the new drives. It's impressive but it won't be enough as we all know.
Toshiba doesn't have a 4TB drive, yet. Seagate has a 4TB GoFlex external drive but no 4TB internal fit drive, the Barracuda XT and Constellation ES both topping out at 3TB. Higher capacity models are probably just around the corner. WD subsidiary Hitachi GST introduced its 4TB drive in April.
The 4TB RE SAS has a suggested retail price of $479.00 with the SATA model going for $459.00. A 1TB RE SAS is $139.00 and a 2TB RE SATA is $229.00. ®
COMMENTS
Agree on the BER, but _if_ it has a suitable number, which I doubt, what is the rebuild time for an array with these in it?
DELL MD3 aka MD3660
umm yes the MD3 does hold 60x 3.5" in 4U that's the product Brett Roscoe is refering too.
aka dell DELL MD3660. Which I think is an OEM NetAPp E5400 right?
Yeah - "normal" thing to do
They all do it. They claim they've selected certain drives and made them differently, in an "enterprise" ready state. Frankly I figure the extra bucks are twofold - one, to get enough dosh to cover the extra warranty claims from running the drives 24x7 for 5 years instead of 8x5 for 3 years (it's 44000 hours instead of 6280), and two, some extra margin for the resellers to make some money off the enterprise drives.
I really do doubt the quality is that different (of course having said that, I'll get home and I'll have lost 4 of the 20 disks in my array of consumer drives).
Sherlock would know whether or not the drives are different ...
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
Requirements Checklist for Choosing a Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Provider
Data control in the cloud
Cloud based data management
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
