Western Digital to launch its high capacity 7,200 RPM Serial ATA hard drives in the Middle East during GITEX Dubai 2005

Reliability-rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (mean time between failure) in high duty cycle environments, WD Caviar® RE2 (RAID Edition) 400 GB hard drives are designed from the ground up to deliver enterprise reliability.

The demand for high capacity, highly dependable storage is rapidly growing. According to market research firm Gartner, the number of EIDE or ATA/SATA terabytes shipped into multi-user servers and storage systems will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 54 per cent between 2005 and 2009.

"The launch of Western Digital's Serial ATA drives is a response to the growing demand from our enterprise customers for hard drives with high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features," said Hafeez Khawaja, Senior Regional Director, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, Western Digital. "Launching this highly advanced hard drive during GITEX Dubai 2005, will give us added mileage in promoting the product in the Middle East markets as the event presents an excellent platform for Western Digital to target the right audience."

To meet the demands of enterprise environments, WD Caviar RE2 hard drives employ RAFF™ (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology, which maintains drive performance in servers and storage arrays. Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), a unique WD feature, maximizes WD Caviar RE2 reliability by coordinating error handling with RAID controllers to help prevent drive fallout caused by extended desktop hard drive error-recovery processes.

Boosting performance on the 7,200 RPM WD Caviar RE2 is Native Command Queuing (NCQ), 16 MB cache and 8.7 milliseconds (ms) average seek time. Like all WD enterprise-class hard drives, WD Caviar RE2 is supported with a 5-year warranty.

"The transition of enterprise infrastructure to serial interfaces is accelerating due to the proven maturity of SATA and the emerging deployment of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI)," added Khawaja. "The next-generation WD Caviar RE2 400 GB represents a significant milestone in the development of the blended SATA-SAS enterprise architecture. This is the first time that SAS is offering a storage ecosystem that interconnects seamlessly with next-generation SATA hard drives. We look forward to demonstrating the capabilities of Western Digital's latest addition to its range of hard drives at GITEX Dubai 2005, and we are certain that this product will be a hot seller in this market."