Tuesday, November 20th 2012
Western Digital Expands Its Highest-Performing Desktop Hard Drives To 4 TB Capacity
WD, a Western Digital company and a world leader in hard drives, today announced its highest performance, highest capacity desktop hard drive, the WD Black 4 TB, 3.5-inch, 7200 RPM drive. Shipping immediately, the fast performance and ultimate capacity of the award-winning WD Black drives make them perfect for gaming, high-performance desktop systems and workstations.
WD Black hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive.
"Maximizing the features and functionality of power computing applications such as gaming, multimedia and video editing, the new WD Black 4 TB hard drives offer capacity and performance-without compromise," said Matt Rutledge, vice president of WD's client storage group. "In choosing WD Black hard drives, WD desktop customers get the best possible mix of capacity, performance and reliability to handle intense desktop computing with ease."
WD Black 4 TB hard drives feature the following:
- Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- Dual actuator technology - A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
- IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
- StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
- NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
Price and Availability
The WD Black 4 TB GB (model WD4001FAEX) hard drives are available through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD Black 4 TB drive is $339.00 USD.
WD Black hard drives combine 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver ultimate performance in a maximum-capacity drive.
WD Black 4 TB hard drives feature the following:
- Dual processor - Twice the processing power to maximize performance.
- Dual actuator technology - A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.
- IntelliSeek - Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
- StableTrac - The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking during read and write operations.
- NoTouch ramp load technology - The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.
Price and Availability
The WD Black 4 TB GB (model WD4001FAEX) hard drives are available through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD Black 4 TB drive is $339.00 USD.
30 Comments on Western Digital Expands Its Highest-Performing Desktop Hard Drives To 4 TB Capacity
3tb Red $169
Western Digital Red WD30EFRX 3TB IntelliPower 64MB...
But again, it all comes down to risk the person is willing to take. Having the drives in RAID1 with the slight risk of TLER kicking one of the drives is a heck of a lot better than having a single 4TB drive by itself. But if I had two 4TB drives and I was wasting one to redundancy anyway, I'd just have the second drive setup as an automatic backup of the first and skip the whole RAID issue.
From WD:
RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER) - "Prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop drives."
What happens is the consumer drives will try multiple times to read a weak or failing sector before marking the sector bad. This can take up to two minutes (according to WD). Sector failure is common. ALL drives eventually relocate sectors. They are relocated over time and when the revovery area is full, SMART will trigger and BIOS reports the drive will inevitably fail or "SMART Hard Drive detects imminent failure". Sector relocation is done to increase production numbers. If only LCD manufactures had it so easy with dead pixles. The larger the drive, the higher the risk of weak, failing, or failed sectors. In a RAID array, the drive has <10sec to recover from an error event or the drive will be flagged as failed and removed from use by the array and reported to the RAID monitoring software. After a reboot it may work again for a day, a week, a month, who knows. Once another error event occurs, it will again be removed from the array. Hope that helps.