Hard disk drive manufacturer Western Digital has announced it will begin shipping this month its new WD RE2 750GB hard drives. The new drive conforms to the SATA-II standard with 3Gbits per second (Gbps) data transfer rates and support Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

The RE2 750GB, model number WD7500AYYS, is rated at 1.2million hours mean-time between failure (MTBF) and comes with a number of previously-released features including SecurePark, StableTrac and IntelliSeek.

SecurePark aims to improve the drive’s ability to withstand shocks by parking the heads away from the platters while they are spinning up, spinning down and during non-operational times. Keeping the heads away from the platter during these times helps to improve reliability by ensuring the platter cannot be scratched and damaged.

StableTrac claims to deliver improved vibration performance as a result of the drive’s motor shaft being anchored at both ends, increasing the accuracy of head tracking during read and write operations on the drive.

IntelliSeek is a power-reduction technology that aims to reduce vibration and noise by moving the heads in such a way that they arrive at the correct sector on the disc just before they need to read that sector’s data. This “just in time” method is said to reduce power consumption by more than 60% compared against standard hard drives as well as improving noise and vibration levels within the drive itself.

"WD has continued to leverage its extensive experience from previous RAID Edition drives, to develop a hard drive perfectly suited for a variety of high-capacity enterprise applications. These drives demand high capacity, reliability, performance and advanced features," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of enterprise storage, WD.

Native Command Queuing is a recent technology developed that allows the hard drive to work out the most efficient way of retrieving data from its platters. It does this by re-ordering as necessary the read and write commands as they come through. By doing this, the drives can reduce access times as well as increased data throughput.

While Linux and Windows Vista support NCQ through the Advanced Host Controller Interface found in many new motherboards, Windows XP does not and requires motherboard device driver support before NCQ can be implemented.

The WD7500AYYS is a 7200RPM drive and includes a five-year limited warranty.

One obvious use for a drive of this time is in audio-video applications such as a home media server where performance and noise reduction are important.

Western Digital will sell the new WD RE2 760GB drives from its website at www.westerndigital.com as well as through its selected retailers. The drive will ship this month and comes with a suggested retail price of $US265.

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