Western Digital, better known as WD in the market, released a new line of hard drives on March 10, geared toward today’s datacenter architects. The WD Re+ hard drive family is designed for power efficiency, consuming only six watts of power for six terabytes of space.
“Dollars and watts are the finite currencies in the modern datacenter,” said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president of storage technology at WD. “With a leading watt-per-gigabyte ratio and the long-trusted reliability of the WD Re hard drive platform, WD Re+ offers our customers with limited power budgets a WD Re-class choice for tier-2, high-intensity storage applications.”
Related: Western Digital puts extra horsepower into newest My Cloud network hard drives
The WD Re+ hard drives are designed to handle up to 550TB per year. They use the typical SATA interface and can reach sustained sequential data rates of up to 225 MB/s. That’s not as fast as a solid state drive of course, but it’s extremely quick for a mechanical drive. This speed is likely helped by very large cache sizes, which can reach up to 128MB.
Other features of the product line include vibration protection, dual actuator technology, and a multi-axis shock sensor designed to detect even the slightest shock events that could harm data. The WD Re+ drives also come with dual processors for redundancy and improved performance.
WD has incorporated some of its trademark technology into the hard drives as well. StableTrac, for instance, secures the motor shaft at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration. NoTouch ramp load technology makes sure that the recording head never touches the disk media, enhancing drive protection.
While designed for datacenters, these drives may also be of interest to home users who want extremely reliable long-term storage. Their many terabytes of space is sure to attract interest, as well.
All of the new hard drives will come with a five-year warranty from the company. More information on each of the products can be found on the WD product website.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.