Western Digital Is Back In the SCSI Business

Once upon a time, when performance in disk drives meant you had to have a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface, developed from the SASI interface, developed by Seagate) add-in card and connected drive, many manufacturers made them. Western Digital never had many offerings, but those it had worked very well.

Then the IDE (integrated drive electronics) interface was developed, and drives became faster, negating the usage of SCSI on all but workstation class and server class machines. Plus, SCSI was not cheap. But it was fast! In the old days, when most all drives had rotational speeds of 5400 RPM, SCSI drives were usually found at 7200 RPM, many times with larger onboard caches. When IDE, later called ATA, to include devices such as Zip drives, optical drives, and tape back-up devices, came to have 7200 RPM speeds, the best SCSI drives had moved to 10,000 RPM, or in some extreme cases 15,000 RPM speeds, again raising the performance bar, and drive prices.

During this time the WD offerings with the SCSI interface were high performing medium cost devices, and held their own in the market. Then, all of a sudden, they were quietly dropped.

Now, WD is back with 10,000 RPM drives, with the SAS interface (serial attached SCSI). The offerings look as though they are re-purposed Raptors and Velociraptors, and as such should perform admirably, and fulfill the other requirement of SCSI drives, high price.

from Tech Connect

Western Digital has now officially introduced the WD S25, its first 10,000 RPM 2.5-inch hard drive boasting a SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface. This new spinner targets the enterprise market, has a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.6 million hours, 16MB of buffer memory, features a sound output while seeking of 34 dBA (yes, that high), and comes in two capacities - 147GB and 300GB, and with either SAS 3.0 Gbps or SAS 6.0 Gbps connectivity, the latter enables a sustained sequential data rate of 128 MB/s.

“Our entry into the traditional-enterprise market continues the strategic expansion and diversification of WD’s broad market and product portfolio, and significantly increases our addressable revenue opportunity,” said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. “As with our previous market expansion and diversification efforts, WD will approach the traditional enterprise space with the same focus on quality, customer service, technology and value that has earned us strong positions in every market we serve.”

Western Digital has started to ship the WD S25 hard drives to the two largest OEMs in the industry.

Because of the noise level, and the pitch of the noise, not many of these will find their way into home users’ machines, but they do offer the performance! Ask anyone who has ever used a really fast SCSI drive and they will tell you it is more than the numbers tell, these things are usually scary fast. So fast you wonder for a while, before you get used to it, if something might not be wrong, and all of the data that was supposed to be written to the drive actually got there. Definitely an experience.

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