The advent of SSDs made some analysts believe that the end of hard drives was near but a few years down the road we can see that they are still alive and well. In fact they keep on offering higher capacities, more speed and more features than ever. Here’s the latest proof – Western Digital has presented new progressive-capacity hard drives.
Wonder what this is? We’ll try to make it simple for you – basically WD presents a 6 TB hard drive and you can buy it at your local WD dealer. But a few months down the road the technology used for this 6 TB model matures and manufacturing processes improve, which allows WD to add some more capacity to a second version of the same drive. So you get the same model inside and out but with 300 GB more under the hood for a total capacity of 6.3 GB.
This is what we have now in the all-new WD Ae hard drive family. This is not your usual hard drive, though. For one thing the platters in these drives spin at 5760 rpm and they have been designed for an average load of 60 TB of recorded data per year. Speaking of this the WD Ae drives will be best used for digital archives and cloud services where they will provide operators with high (and growing) capacities, low prices and low power consumption being perfect for “cold” data that is seldom accessed, yet cannot be deleted. The first drive of the kind comes with a capacity of 6.3 TB.
The rest of the specs include a 3.5-inch form factor, support for SATA-600, 64 MB of cache on the drive itself and MTBF of 500,000 hours. Users of the drive also get a 3-year warranty. No word on pricing as of now, though.
Source: Western Digital