Energy efficient

Reduced medial spin lowers power consumption and optimizes the drive’s read/write ratio for the rigid requirements of cold storage systems.

Proven cold storage reliability

With 700 PBs of cold storage deployed in datacenters already*, WD’s 4th generation WD Ae utilizes innovative technology to reduce power consumption and lower operating temperature, which results in a more reliable and affordable solution for cold storage data archives.

*Data reflects archive drive shipments as of August 2014

Cost-effective capacity storage

Moving cold data to value-optimized archive media delivers significant TCO savings by freeing up expensive performance-critical storage system capacity.

Quick Data Retrieval

Access time to cold data is quickly becoming a critical feature of an on-line archive system and end users can’t wait hours, days, or weeks for this data to become available. The spin-down capability of WD Ae provides much faster access times than conventional archive tape with data access times of less than 20 seconds for on-demand data requests.

Cold-data power management

Best-in-class power management, reduced heat output, and next-generation technologies such as IntelliSeek combine to deliver a balance of performance and power that is perfect for cold data archive storage architectures.

3D Active Balance Plus

Our enhanced dual-plane balance control technology significantly improves the overall drive performance and reliability. Hard drives that are not properly balanced may cause excessive vibration and noise in a multi-drive system, reduce the hard drive life span, and degrade the performance over time.

Dual actuator technology

A head positioning system with two actuators that improves positional accuracy over the data track(s). The primary actuator provides coarse displacement using conventional electromagnetic actuator principles. The secondary actuator uses piezoelectric motion to fine tune the head positioning to a higher degree of accuracy.

Ideal for:

The WD Ae is best suited for cold storage, backup and data archiving where data is stored on disk but rarely if almost never read again yet may be critical at some future point, prime examples being legal data or photo backups.

NoTouch ramp load technology

The recording head never touches the disk media ensuring significantly less wear to the recording head and media as well as better drive protection in transit.

24x7 dedicated customer support

Every WD Ae hard drive comes with our world-class professional support services including a dedicated 24x7 support line (available in English, other regional support hours vary) and a 3-year limited warranty.

Disk Utilities and Migration Tools

Acronis True Image WD Edition can clone drives, backup your operating system, applications, settings and all of your data, while also having the ability to securely wipe any data you no longer need. You can quickly and easily deploy a new hard drive to your PC or laptop and automatically migrate your operating system, applications, and all of your important data, including images, music, and documents.