WD spins up serial ATA hard drive

 

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By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Feb 2003 at 12:47

Western Digital, well known for its desktop hard disks, enters the enterprise storage market with a new drive.

It claims the WD Raptor (WD360GD) to be the world's first 10,000rpm serial ATA hard drive. With a 36Gb capacity, it can achieve a throughput of 150Mb/sec. Western Digital also claims an average seek time of 5.2 milliseconds and 1.2 million hours MTBF - that's mean time between failure. It has a five-year warranty.

Expect the WD Raptor to be shipping before the end of this month.

'Our entrance into the enterprise market marks the next step in our growth,' said the president and COO of Western Digital, Arif Shakeel. 'With this announcement, Western Digital extends beyond our consistently profitable desktop market, and brings unique Western Digital know-how to the enterprise market. With exploding growth predicted, Western Digital is poised to continue to be an important player in the core of the rapidly growing storage marketplace.'

Western Digital quotes IDC analysis that average year-on-year storage growth will be 46 per cent between 2002 and 2006.

Serial ATA (SATA) is a new interface technology, improving the communication between processors and a computer's components.