Addressing a growing enterprise market for high capacity, highly reliable storage, Western Digital today announced it is now shipping its WD RE2 (RAID Edition) 500 GB SATA hard drives.

It features the NCQ (Native Command Queue), with 3.9 GB/s transfer rate, 16MB cache and random I/O environments. Its warranty is 5 years.

WD RE2 hard drives are designed for network attached storage, direct attached server storage and video surveillance environments that require 100 percent duty cycle. With over 1.2 million MTBF (meaning time between failure), RE2 are excellent HDD for file servers, e-mail servers, database servers, Web servers, video surveillance and scientific computing. Also, they can function as back-up (virtual tape libraries (VTL), disk-to-disk backup, nearline content addressable storage and tiered storage environments).

WD RE2 hard drives also employ RAFF™ (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) technology, which provides best-in-class vibration tolerance by optimizing operation and performance when the drives are used in servers and storage arrays where rotational vibration robs performance.

Estimated pricing for WD RE2 500 GB is $349.99.

And the statements:

“As market adoption of both Enterprise SATA and WD’s RAID Edition hard drives has continued to grow, WD has leveraged its extensive experience gained from previous generation RAID Edition drives, as well as our enterprise-class WD Raptor® drives, to develop a hard drive perfectly suited for enterprise storage: high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features,” said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage for WD. “With the introduction of WD RE2 500 GB enterprise hard drives, WD delivers the greatest reliability and capacity of all SATA hard drives available.”

“WD RE2 drives are specifically designed for RAID environments and complement LSI Logic MegaRAID controller products,” said Luca Bert, director of DAS product management, Engenio Storage Group, LSI Logic. “By combining MegaRAID products with the performance, capacity and reliability of WD RE2 drives, customers are able to create highly reliable, cost-effective storage solutions.”