WD at Computex 2013 Booth Tour Day 5 - SE Mass Storage, RE Robustness, XE Performance & WD Giveaway
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
870 words · ~4 min read
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Linus Tech tips coverage of computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our
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trusted gaming gear partner is Corsair Vengeance and our trusted retail partner
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is
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nc.com is day four of computex and we're
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kicking it off at our home base here in the WD Booth this is the red drive a
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consumer grade Drive suitable for applications where you have anywhere
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from 1 to five drives in a raid environment it only comes in up to 3
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terab capacities though okay so what if you have something like this that
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accepts 10 drives what if you have something like this that's just begging
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to have six drives installed in it what if you need four terabyte drives well
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all of a sudden you're going to be looking at the
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wdsc scalable capacity as well as Data
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Center capacity so what what the heck does that even mean so number one is for
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high-end consumers you can use a desktop Naz like this number two is that because
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it shares so much DNA from the re Drive
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the rate Edition Drive the more traditional Enterprise Drive it is
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suitable for applications such as cloud storage so technology it's got a dual
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stage actuator which basically amounts to the Head being able to read data off
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of it more accurately so this is good it has raft technology and which basically
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amounts to it being less susceptible to
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vibrations from other drives causing performance degradation it has tle which
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allows it to not drop out of raid arrays even in well difficult ult circumstances
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and last but not least it has stable track technology which makes it less
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likely to transmit vibrations to other drives all of these things are optimized
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for multi-drive configurations so let's head over here where we're talking about
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a pretty serious multi-drive configuration in this kind of an
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application traditionally they would have deployed an re or Raid Edition
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Drive where it's got a 1.4 million hour meantime between failure it is extremely
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robust it is rated for 247 365 operation
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with a 100% duty cycle but if your
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Google Drive for example not all of this
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data is going to be necessarily accessed all the time so a 50% duty cycle might
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be okay that happens to be what the SE rated for also these customers who are
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storing their pictures or whatever else they're they're not going to be accessing it necessarily you know nearly
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as much so an 800,000 hour meantime between failure might also be okay and
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last but not least because these cloud storage applications are moving away
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from being so dependent on raid and moving more towards redundancy as
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opposed to and and replication as opposed to complicated raid controllers
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all of a sudden we're in a situation where if a drive suddenly dies you might
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have time to at your leisure replace it
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because you know that that data is replicated in a couple of other places
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so customers such as cloud storage companies who don't need the the
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robustness of an re but want capacity
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might lean towards an SE because it sits in between the red and the re in terms
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of pricing meaning you can get that capacity you need you get that build
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quality you need but you can save a little bit as well but what if you don't
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need the maximum in capacity and you'd rather have the maximum in performance
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this is the WD XE this is a SAS Drive
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optimized for as you may or may not have guessed already based on what I just
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said maximum performance it's a 2 and 1 half inch Drive which contributes to a
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couple of cool things number one is that it gives it outstanding random read and
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right performance because physically the heads don't have to move as far to read
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data off of the platter number two is that it contributes to power savings you
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can actually run these drives with an up to 67% power reduction compared to a 3
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and 1/2 in equivalent now there are some caveats um okay so you got compatibility
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with 2 and 1/2 in or 3 and 1/2 in dri sleds but you are still at a maximum
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capacity of 900 GB per drive for a
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deployment like this so it's pretty much well there you go there's SE and re for
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maximum storage space and maximum robustness and then there's XE if you
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don't care quite as much about those things as well as much about storage
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space but you want maximum performance and the robustness of the drive is
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actually better than either of the other two as well with a two million hour
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meantime between failure guys don't miss any of our computex coverage we're
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powered by the show here by WD as well as Corsair Vengeance gaming peripherals
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and nc.com and as always don't forget to subscribe to lineus Tech tips for more
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