Gadgetory

- tech tips coverage of Computex 2013 is powered by Western Digital our trusted gaming gear partner is course our vengeance and our trusted retail partner is NCI XCOM it's day four of Computex and we're kicking it off at our own base here in the WD booth this is the red drive a consumer-grade drive suitable for applications where you have anywhere from one to five drives in a raid environment it only comes in up to three terabyte capacities though ok so what if you have something like this that accepts ten drives what if you have something like this that's just begging to have six drives installed in it what if you need four terabyte drives well all of a sudden you're gonna be looking at the wdse scalable capacity as well as data center capacity so what the heck does that even mean so number one is for high-end consumers you can use a desktop now as like this number two is that because it shares so much DNA from the re drive the raid Edition drive the more traditional Enterprise Drive it is suitable for applications such as cloud storage so technology it's got a dual stage actuator which basically amounts to the head being able to read data off of it more accurately so this is good it has RAF technology and which basically amounts to it being less susceptible to vibrations from other drives causing performance degradation it has TL er which allows it to not drop out of raid arrays even in well difficult circumstances and last but not least it has stable Trac technology which makes it less likely to transmit vibrations to other drives all of these things are optimized for multi drive configurations so let's head over here where we're talking about a pretty serious multi drive configuration in this kind of an application traditionally they would have deployed an Ari or raid Edition drive where it's got a 1.4 million hour mean time between failure is an extremely robust it is rated for 24/7 365 operation what they want a hundred percent duty cycle but if you're Google Drive for example not all of this data is going to be necessarily accessed all the time so a 50 percent duty Michael might be okay that happens to be what the SC's rated for also these customers who are storing their pictures or whatever else they're they're not going to be accessing it necessarily you know nearly as much so an 800,000 our mean time between failure might also be okay and last but not least because these cloud storage applications are moving away from being so dependent on raid and moving more towards redundancy as opposed to and replication as opposed to complicated raid controllers all of a sudden were in a situation where if a drive suddenly dies you might have time to at your leisure replace it because you know that that data is replicated in a couple of other places so customers such as cloud storage companies who don't need the the robustness of an AR II but want capacity might lean towards an SC because it sits in between the red and the re in terms of pricing meaning you can get that capacity you need you get that build quality that you need but you can save a little bit as well but what if you don't need the maximum in capacity and you'd rather have the maximum in performance this is the Delta you DXE this is a SAS drive optimized for as you may or may not have guessed already based on what I just said maximum performance it's a two and a half inch drive which contributes to a couple of cool things number one is that it gives it outstanding random read and write performance because physically the heads don't have to move as far to read data off of the platter number two is that it contributes to power savings you can actually run these drives with an up to 67% power reduction compared to a three and a half inch equivalent now there are some caveats okay so you got compatibility with two and a half inch or three and a half inch drive sleds but you are stuck at a maximum capacity of 900 gigabytes per drive for a deployment like this so it's pretty much well there you go there's SE and re for maximum storage space and maximum robustness and then there's XE if you don't care quite as much about those things as well as much about storage space but you want maximum performance and the robustness of the drive is actually better than either the other two as well with a million our mean time between failure guys don't miss any of our Computex coverage we're powered by the show here by WD as well as Corsair Vengeance gaming peripherals and NCIX comm and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos