WESTERN DIGITAL HAS finally thrown its hat into the SAS ring with the release of the S25 line. Most observers were not expecting this, thinking WD would go from SATA directly to SSDs.
The new line of 2.5″ drives comes with either SAS-3 or SAS-6 interfaces, and 147GB and 300GB capacities. The drives are 10K RPM units, not the hoped for 15K, but still deliver a claimed 128MB/s sustained data rate. While whether that’s the read or write rate is not specified, the transfer rate is listed as Buffer to Disk, so one would assume that is for write, and it’s a fairly respectable write speed at that.
Seek times are listed as 4.2ms write, 3.6ms read, and a track to track seek of 0.7ms. Combined with a 16MB buffer and a SAS-6 interface, you should have a pretty speedy drive. WD also claims a 1.6 million hour MTBF, and power consumption of 7.35W read/write, 5.18W idle.
Availability is said to be immediate with shipments already having started to OEMs. Unfortunately, the line has not hit any etailers yet, so MSRPs are not known, but we expect them to be in line with other SAS drives, somewhere between premium SATA and low end SSD prices. More players in a field are always a good thing, and you can read all the details on these new high-end storage options here.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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