WD had released another 4TB enterprise hard drive, the made by its Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) unit, in April.
WD completed its , now known as Viviti Technologies Ltd., in March
WD today expanded its enterprise-class storage offerings with the release of new WD RE SAS and WD RE SATA hard drives that offer capacities of up to 4 TB, said to be the highest available capacity today.
The RE drives are available in 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB capacities for nearline SAS (serial-attached SCSI) and 2 TB, 3 TB and 4 TB for drives based on the lower-performance SATA (serial ATA) specification.
The RE SAS drives have a sustained sequential data transfer rate of up to 182 MB/s, while the RE SATA drives have a sustained sequential data transfer rate of up to 171 MB/s.
Like the Ultrastar 7K4000 line, the new RE SAS and SATA 4TB drives, contain five 800GB platters.
Both the SAS and SATA drive products use the latest 6Gbps-interface specification.
Unlike the Ultrastar drives, the new RE SAS and SATA drives do not have a native encryption option. WD said it would be offering encryption on the RE SAS model in the future.
"The WD RE SAS and SATA 4 TB drives are designed, tested and optimized for enterprise storage and applications, enabling 33% greater capacity than previously available drives and up to 2.4 PB of raw capacity in a single enterprise rack," Doug Pickford, a senior director of business marketing for WD, said in a statement.
Dell is one of WD's resellers offering the new drives in its , offering up to 240TB of capacity in a single array.
The new RE SAS and RE SATA drives offer a 1.4 million and 1.2 million hour mean time before failure, respectively. The 3.5-inch WD RE SAS and RE SATA hard drives are covered by a five-year limited warranty.
The new RE drives pricing schedule follows:
4TB RE SAS drive: $479
3TB RE SAS drive: $369
2TB RE SAS drive: $249
1TB RE SAS drive: $139
4TB RE SATA drive: $459
3TB RE SATA drive: $349
2TB RE SATA drive: $229