Western Digital is expanding its portfolio for enterprise customers with a new, mid-range series of 4 terabyte (TB), 6TB and 8TB air-based hard drives.

The new products are designed for corporate data centers having data set sizes smaller than found in hyperscale environments, for which WD is offering high-capacity (up to 14TB) drives, based on HelioSeal helium-sealing technology.

Available immediately for qualification, the new Ultrastar 7K6, supporting 4TB and 6TB capacity points, utilizes a new 4-disk, enterprise class, air-based design. The new products provide up to 12 percent faster performance than the prior generation Ultrastar 7K6000 and is designed for traditional storage and server applications as well as distributed and scalable computing, including block-and-file storage architecture. Later this quarter, the company will deliver an Ultrastar 7K8 8TB solution, which is based on an air-based design and is the ninth generation of the company's 5-disk platform.

The 4TB, 6TB and 8TB offerings will be ready for volume ramp during the second calendar quarter of 2018. Western Digital's media cache and flash-based non-volatile cache (NVC) are implemented to improve write performance. These new enterprise drives will be available in either SAS or SATA interfaces and provide a MTBF rating of 2M hours.