Western Digital unveils Next-Gen storage drives

Global data storage company Western Digital on Friday announced that it is expanding its portfolio for enterprise customers with a new, mid-range series of 4TB, 6TB and 8TB hard drives.

The new products help corporate data centres having data-set sizes smaller than ones in hyper-scale environments to harness the power of data in applications such as analytics and distributed file systems, the company said in a statement.

"Our new enterprise solutions blend the technology and total cost of ownership of Western Digital's capacity enterprise product line will allow OEMs to offer data centres a solution to keep Big Data on-premises, rather than transition entirely to the Cloud," Brendan Collins, Vice President of Marketing, Devices Business Unit at Western Digital, said in a statement.

Available immediately for qualification, the new "Ultrastar 7K6", supporting 4TB and 6TB capacity points, utilises a new four-disk, enterprise class and air-based design.

The company claims that its new products provide up to 12 per cent faster performance than the prior generation Ultrastar 7K6000 and is designed for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block-and-file storage architecture.

Later this quarter, the company will deliver an Ultrastar 7K8 8TB solution, which is based on an air-based design and is the ninth generation of the company's 5-disk platform.