WD, a division of Western Digital announced availability of the WD Se line of hard drives designed for scale-out data center deployments. The drives are shipping in capacities up to four terabytes.

Richard Rutledge, senir VP of WD's data center storage business unit, said the company was using the drives in its own data center for Hadoop. “WD’s utilization of vast amounts of manufacturing and engineering data has forced us – like many other companies – to use map-reduce methodologies to effectively analyze our data,” he said.

“The WD Se hard drives are used in our own big data center, where we have gained real-world experience with Apache Hadoop.”

The company said its new drives also addressed the network-attached storage (NAS) market for small and medium businesses. The SMB-focused six-bay-plus table-top NAS units and rack-mount multi-tenant NAS solutions with up to 24 bays, provide NAS integrators a complement to WD Red hard drives, which are for small NAS systems, the company said.

The new hard drives, priced from US$159.99 to $309.99, feature:

- A dual processor for twice the processing power to maximize performance

- Enhanced Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF) technology that includes sophisticated electronics to monitor the drive and correct both linear and rotational vibration in real time

- Dual actuator technology improves head positional accuracy over the data track(s)

- StableTrac whereby the motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations delivering a consistent level of performance for applications

- Multi-axis shock sensor automatically detects the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data

- RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives

- Dynamic fly height technology where each read-write head’s fly height is adjusted in real time for optimum reliability