Western Digital Gets Back Into SCSI

http://www.lockergnome.com/theoracle/2011/01/18/western-digital-gets-back-into-scsi/

Well, not just SCSI Serial Attached SCSI.

Those whose memory goes back a while may remember that Western Digital has not always been the purveyor of IDE, EIDE, or ATA devices alone. No, there was a time when the company had a couple of SCSI drives on its shelves for sale, and even a SCSI controller or two.

The drives were very good, though back in that time I don’t think many people knew SCSI existed outside the name Seagate. Seagate was so heavily into SCSI that most people I knew had only seen Seagate SCSI drives, and many marveled when I showed off my IBM branded SCSI drives. (Some may  remember that if you wanted 7200 RPM drives, SCSI was the exclusive way to get them!)

Now Western Digital has released 4 new drives, all being of the Serial Attached SCSI variety, and two of each size, 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch. The drives are considered enterprise-class, and feature 5 year warranties, but only 32MB cache, which is odd, considering their classification, and the speed of the 2.5 inch drives. The smaller platters revolve at 10,000 RPM, which makes for speedy results, but also makes it necessary to make sure the data stream is uninterrupted. (WD has a caching algorithm that has been proven to be very effective, but there is still no substitute for more cache in drives!)

[TechConnect]

Western Digital has now expanded its enterprise storage offer with four new hard drives, two S25 series 2.5-inch models and two RE SAS 3.5-inch HDDs. All four drives feature a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) 6.0 Gbps interface and include 32MB of buffer.

The S25 HDDs operate at 10,000 RPM (rotations per minute), have a 1.75 million hour MTBF and provide 450GB and 600GB worth of storage space, while the fresh RE SAS 1TB and 2TB drives work at 7200 RPM and reach a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.2 million hours.

I wonder, since these will no doubt carry enterprise class pricing, why they are not carrying 64MB of cache, and possibly a slightly longer warranty period. 

Since most enterprise drives are used in a 24/7 environment, and we know that startup-shutdown cycles are the cause of most failures, I’m starting to think that for the extra dollars spent on drives of this type, perhaps at least another year tacked on to the warranty period would be very nice – and boost sales for the brand to boot. (We all remember what happened when Seagate dropped their warranties on their best drives from 5 to 3 years…they became number 2 after being number one for nearly ever.)

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