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Western Digital is launching its first 4TB drives today, and it’s aiming them at the enterprise storage market. The new drives come in SATA and SAS flavors and chock full of the latest in high-end features, including vibration-tolerant hardware, stabilized motor shafts, pre-emptive wear leveling, and extended burn-in testing. The SAS flavor offers dual port capability and both models are five platter designs packing 800GB per platter while maintaining a 7200 RPM spindle speed.

They’re also apparently really, really good for digital surveillance. The feature image above is drawn from WD’s own prominent advertising on the RE4 series; the company emphasizes that these products (at least, the SATA flavors) are “ideal for servers, storage arrays, video surveillance, and other demanding applications.”

A full comparison of the specifications between the SATA and SAS versions is provided below.

These are some of the first 4TB drives on the market, and while they command a premium (pricing ranges from $459 to $479), even the consumer-oriented HGST 4TB drive sells for $299 at NewEgg. We’ll undoubtedly see 4TB prices fall in the next 12-18 months as higher platter densities are rolled out. Five platters is the typical maximum for drives these days, although HGST’s recent helium HDD announcement is proof that the company plans 6-7 platter drives — though probably not for mainstream consumer shipments.

These drives are marketed for “nearline” applications, which means WD recommends putting them in configurations where large amounts of storage capacity is needed but access times aren’t critical. Nearline drives strike a balance between immediate access (a field increasingly dominated by SSDs) and long-term archival storage, where retrieval can take several minutes. As such, these drives offer high-end features but retain the more pedestrian 7200 RPM speeds rather than the 15,000 RPM that was once a hallmark of the enterprise storage industry.