WD ships low-cost high-grade 4TB hard drive

Western Digital announced today the WD Se SATA 3.5-inch standard hard drive, which offers up to 4TB of storage space.

While it's not the first hard drive with this top capacity -- both WD and Seagate have had other 4TB hard drives -- WD says that the new WD Se is the first that's designed for scale-out data center deployments, yet is still affordable. The hard drive supports the latest SATA 3 (6Gbps) standard, comes with 64MB of cache memory, and spins at 7,200rpm.

According to WD, the new hard drive uses enterprise components and technologies to offer reliable always-on operation. For this reason, the new hard drive works best inside a storage system, such as a NAS server, where data needs to be available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

WD says the WD Se hard drive undergoes at least 5 million hours of functional and thermal testing and more than 20 million hours of additional testing under actual workloads in server and storage systems. According to WD, it also has:

• Dual processor and dual actuator technologies to increase the processing power and to improve head positional accuracy over the data tracks.
• 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.
• StableTrac technology that secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration.
• Multi-axis shock sensor that automatically detects even the subtlest shock events and compensates to protect the data corruption.
• RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) technology that prevents drive failure caused by the extended hard-drive error-recovery processes.
• Dynamic fly height technology that adjusts each read-write head's fly height in real time for optimum reliability.

The new WD Se is available now in 2TB, 3TB, and 4TB capacities slated to cost between $160 and $310. The hard drive comes with a five-year warranty.