Western digital's raptor enters the enterprise storage market - Storage Networking - Brief Article

Computer Technology Review, Feb, 2003 by Louis Raphael

Western Digital is entering the enterprise hard drive market with an Enterprise Serial ATA (ESATA) product called the WD Raptor. The new hard drive offers systems builders and storage vendors enterprise-class specifications: 1.2 million hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) and 10,000 RPM, 5.2 milliseconds (ms) average seek time.

Combined with an SATA interface, Western Digital designed a new, enterprise-class mechanical platform for the WD Raptor hard drive to meet the 24x7 demands of the enterprise environment.

With its WD Raptor, Western Digital applies its high-volume design and manufacturing principles and economies of scale from its ATA business to an enterprise-class platform. The result is an ESATA hard drive with a significant cost advantage over SCSI devices.

SATA offers system-level benefits in the enterprise environment, including point-to-point configuration, which utilizes the full bandwidth of each drive interface in a networked environment; scalability; hot-plug support for system design flexibility; and advanced error detection for data integrity.

The hard drive is currently being shipped to vendors and will initially be shipped in a 36 GB capacity. In addition to its 5.2 ms average seek time, 10,000 RPM, and 1.2 million hours MTBF, data throughput is 150 MB/second from the SATA interface. The performance roadmap for SATA extends up to 600 MB/second, ensuring a reliable standard for storage providers and customers in the years ahead.

www.westerndigital.com