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nc.com is day four of computex and we're
kicking it off at our home base here in the WD Booth this is the red drive a
consumer grade Drive suitable for applications where you have anywhere
from 1 to five drives in a raid environment it only comes in up to 3
terab capacities though okay so what if you have something like this that
accepts 10 drives what if you have something like this that's just begging
to have six drives installed in it what if you need four terabyte drives well
all of a sudden you're going to be looking at the
wdsc scalable capacity as well as Data
Center capacity so what what the heck does that even mean so number one is for
high-end consumers you can use a desktop Naz like this number two is that because
it shares so much DNA from the re Drive
the rate Edition Drive the more traditional Enterprise Drive it is
suitable for applications such as cloud storage so technology it's got a dual
stage actuator which basically amounts to the Head being able to read data off
of it more accurately so this is good it has raft technology and which basically
amounts to it being less susceptible to
vibrations from other drives causing performance degradation it has tle which
allows it to not drop out of raid arrays even in well difficult ult circumstances
and last but not least it has stable track technology which makes it less
likely to transmit vibrations to other drives all of these things are optimized
for multi-drive configurations so let's head over here where we're talking about
a pretty serious multi-drive configuration in this kind of an
application traditionally they would have deployed an re or Raid Edition
Drive where it's got a 1.4 million hour meantime between failure it is extremely
robust it is rated for 247 365 operation
with a 100% duty cycle but if your
Google Drive for example not all of this
data is going to be necessarily accessed all the time so a 50% duty cycle might
be okay that happens to be what the SE rated for also these customers who are
storing their pictures or whatever else they're they're not going to be accessing it necessarily you know nearly
as much so an 800,000 hour meantime between failure might also be okay and
last but not least because these cloud storage applications are moving away
from being so dependent on raid and moving more towards redundancy as
opposed to and and replication as opposed to complicated raid controllers
all of a sudden we're in a situation where if a drive suddenly dies you might
have time to at your leisure replace it
because you know that that data is replicated in a couple of other places
so customers such as cloud storage companies who don't need the the
robustness of an re but want capacity
might lean towards an SE because it sits in between the red and the re in terms
of pricing meaning you can get that capacity you need you get that build
quality you need but you can save a little bit as well but what if you don't
need the maximum in capacity and you'd rather have the maximum in performance
this is the WD XE this is a SAS Drive
optimized for as you may or may not have guessed already based on what I just
said maximum performance it's a 2 and 1 half inch Drive which contributes to a
couple of cool things number one is that it gives it outstanding random read and
right performance because physically the heads don't have to move as far to read
data off of the platter number two is that it contributes to power savings you
can actually run these drives with an up to 67% power reduction compared to a 3
and 1/2 in equivalent now there are some caveats um okay so you got compatibility
with 2 and 1/2 in or 3 and 1/2 in dri sleds but you are still at a maximum
capacity of 900 GB per drive for a
deployment like this so it's pretty much well there you go there's SE and re for
maximum storage space and maximum robustness and then there's XE if you
don't care quite as much about those things as well as much about storage
space but you want maximum performance and the robustness of the drive is
actually better than either of the other two as well with a two million hour
meantime between failure guys don't miss any of our computex coverage we're
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