Western Digital has introduced a new high capacity data center hard drive with dramatically reduced power requirements.

The WD Re+ can store up to 6TB in a 3.5-inch form-factor while consuming 6W under load and just 4.6W when idle - the lowest ever power consumption for a high capacity drive. In comparison, WD’s stalwart Re drives need at least 10W to provide just 4TB of capacity.

“Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern data center,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology at WD. “Massive, scale-out deployments must deliver tremendous value to customers across a range of applications, while providing a healthy return to the infrastructure owner. WD is focused on offering that value across its portfolio.”

Power-optimized

Re+ drives support SATA 6 Gb/s connectivity and are available immediately in 5TB and 6TB capacities.

Inside, we find five high-density platters and 128 MB cache, delivering sustained sequential data rates of up to 225 MB/s despite the slower rotational speed.

Re+ HDDs were designed to reliably handle 550 TB worth of workloads per year - the highest workload capabilities of any WD 3.5-inch hard drive - with 1.2 million hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). For the peace of mind, they are covered by WD’s five-year limited warranty.

Next quarter, Western Digital is set to add 6TB HDD versions to its popular Re and Se data center product lines. All three high capacity drives could be seen on the show floor at the Open Compute Conference in San Jose, California.