A few months ago, back in January, Western Digital became the first hard drive vendor to offer 2TB hard drives to the masses. Though they have since been followed by other rival manufacturers, they still had that to hold on to. Seagate went to one-up them by a bit, just a week later, introducing 2TB hard drives aimed at the enterprise. Now, Western Digital has finally come up with their own solution aimed at business users, unveiling their first 2TB enterprise-class hard drives, part of their RE drive series.
The RD4-GP sports 64MB of cache, dual I/O processors, and increased areal density to yield as much as a 25 percent performance improvement over the previous generation while consuming 40 percent less power. The most important aspect for the enterprise, of course, is reliability - and Western Digital rates these drives with a 1.2 million hour MTBF (mean time before failure) in high duty cycle environments. The new drives are available now from select online retailers and distributors, priced at $329, or just under 17 cents a GB.