Western Digital Expands with Mid-Range eHDD Offerings

Western Digital Corporation is expanding its portfolio with a new, mid-range series of 4TB, 6TB and 8TB air-based hard drives, the HGST Ultrastar 7K6 and Ultrastar 7K8. The new drives are aimed at enterprise setups which don’t require 10, 12, 14TB of storage per drive. Why pay for something you don’t need? After all, keeping the total cost of ownership down is a top priority in most cases.

“The power of Big Data is driving the need for higher capacities across a broad spectrum of applications,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of marketing, Devices Business Unit, Western Digital. “Today, mid-range applications are preparing to move from 1TB and 2TB configurations to higher capacities. Our new enterprise solutions blend the technology and TCO leadership of Western Digital’s capacity enterprise product line with a high-density, air-based hard drive design, allowing OEMs to offer data centres a solution to keep Big Data on-premise, rather than transition entirely to the cloud.”

HGST Ultrastar 7K6

The new Ultrastar 7K6 come in a 4TB and a 6TB capacity. The drive utilizes a new 4-disk enterprise-class design. It is an air-based design and not a helium-filled like the bigger brothers. Performance-wise, the new Ultrastar 7K6 is 12 percent faster than the prior generation of Ultrastar 7K6000. And that is always a nice thing. It is designed for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed and scalable computing. That also includes block-and-file storage architecture.

HGST Ultrastar 7K8

The Ultrastar 7K8 will launch later this quarter as an 8TB solution. This is also an air-based design like the Ultrastar 7K6. It is the ninth generation Western Digital air-based design and it is a 5-disk platform.

General Specifications

Both the new Ultrastar 7K6 and the Ultrastar 7K8 come with an enterprise-class MTBF rating of 2 million hours. Both of them will also be available as SAS and SATA versions with various sector sizes. They are 7200RPM drives with a 4.16ms average latency and a 256MB cache buffer. The seek times are rated at 8.0ms during read and 8.6ms during write operations.

Last but not least, Western Digital backs the Ultrastar 7K8 (link) and 7K6 (link) with a 5-year warranty.