Western Digital enters enterprise-storage market
There have always been fewer options in the enterprise-storage market than there have been in the consumer market. That's why it's significant that enterprise buyers now have another choice.
Western Digital announced Tuesday its entry into the enterprise market with the first shipments of its WD S25, 10,000rpm, 2.5-inch SAS interface hard drives.
The new WD S25 enterprise hard drive from Western Digital.
(Credit: Western Digital)While high-end consumer-grade 2.5-inch SATA hard drives can spin at 7,200rpm, at 10,000rpm the new hard drive from Western Digital is still considered entry-level. This is because in the enterprise market, vendors such as Seagate already offer SAS-based hard drives that spin at 15,000rpm.
Nonetheless, according to Western Digital, the new WD S25 drive is still suitable for high-performance storage for mission-critical enterprise server and enterprise-storage applications, such as high-I/O-driven applications, data centers, and large data arrays. Each drive offers up to 300GB of storage space.
The WD S25 supports both the 3Gbps and the 6Gbps SAS interfaces and offers a sustained sequential data rate of 128MBps. In addition to having the speed needed for enterprise needs, the WD S25 also provides a mean time between failures (MTBF) rating of 1.6 million hours.
The WD S25 drive is available now. You won't be able to buy one for yourself, but chances are you'll find them in your new enterprise-storage gear.
Dong Ngo is a CNET editor who covers networking and network storage, and writes about anything else he finds interesting. You can also listen to his podcast at insidecnetlabs.cnet.com. E-mail Dong. 
