WD today announced its WD Ae line of hard drives designed for the operating characteristics of the emerging archive tier within web-scale datacenters. Focusing on the attributes of cold data, WD has led the cold/archive market with multiple generations of archive storage.

Part of the attributes of the WD Ae hard drive family includes: a five-platter platform, which renders an optimal mix of power, performance, capacity and cost; capacities greater than 6 TB; SATA 6 Gb/s interface; and a workload and reliability rating of 60 TB/yr workload and 500 Khrs Mean Time Before Failure (MTBF).

As technology and manufacturing processes mature over time, incremental capacity increases are realized. WD's Progressive Capacity model allows distribution of these incrementally higher capacity models to take advantage of their fullest available capacity: 6.1 TB, 6.2 TB, or 6.3 TB, for instance. These more granular capacity increments result in far greater capacity attainment through the life of a product platform.

Cold storage is the practice of creating a new tier of important information not frequently accessed for long periods of time, and can include structured, unstructured, or semi-structured data that has timeless value, and of which the exact schedule of retrieval is uncertain.

WD Ae hard drives will be sold in box quantities of 20 and be available starting late 2014. The drives are covered by a three-year limited warranty.