Western Digital has updated its family of hard disk drives (HDDs) aimed at enterprises with new Caviar RAID Edition 2 (RE2) product. The new hard drives are only compatible with Serial ATA-150 interface and offer a number of technologies designed to boost performance of storage sub-system. In addition, the Caviar RE2 is WD's first HDD to use 100GB platters.

“The transition of enterprise infrastructure to serial interfaces is accelerating due to the proven maturity of SATA and the emerging deployment of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI),” said Richard E. Rutledge, vice president and general manager of WD’s Computing Components Group.

Initially WD will supply only one Caviar RE2 model with capacity of 400GB and Serial ATA-150 interconnection compatible with both Serial ATA and Serial Attached SCSI deployments. The new WD Caviar RE2 will use 7200rpm motor, incorporate 16MB cache and will support Native Command Queuing (NCQ) technology. The maker declares 8.7ms read seek time, 9.8ms write seek time and 4.20ms average latency for its new product.

WD Caviar RE2 hard drives employ RAFF (Rotary Accelerometer Feed Forward) technology, which maintains drive performance in servers and storage arrays where rotational vibration robs performance. Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), a WD feature, maximizes WD Caviar RE2 reliability in the enterprise by coordinating error handling with RAID controllers to help prevent drive fallout caused by extended desktop hard drive error-recovery processes.

Western Digital’s WD Caviar RE2 also improve MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) to 1.2 million hours, up from 1 million hours of the previous-generation WD Caviar RE. WD’s new enterprise drives are offered with 5-year limited warranty.

WD Caviar RE2 400 GB hard drives began shipping this month and will be shipping in volume next month. Estimated street pricing for WD Caviar RE2 is $289.