Western Digital gearing up to sell 3TB drives

Isilon to sell itself

Western Digital is tipped to barge into the 3.5 inch 3TB drive market as early as this month.

Techarp has been told WD will launch a set of 3TB 3.5-inch hard disk drives (HDD) later this month.

Currently only Seagate ships a 3TB dive, a 5-platter unit available as an external drive or included in its BlackArmor NAS desktop product.

The Caviar Black, Blue and Green products will have 3TB versions added as will WD's external drive products like the Elements and MyBook ranges. The drives will be available at launch or shortly after, giving WD's channel a great Christmas line-up.

In other news, Bloomberg tells us Isilon is for sale. The company makes scale-out clustered filers and is popular in the rich media sector, doing things like post-production processing for films.

Apparently it has hired Qatalyst Partners, the firm that so successfully orchestrated the bidding contest between Dell and HP for 3PAR, and made fortunes for the 3PAR investors concerned.

There is speculation that Dell might be a possible buyer, although having seen the Frank Quattrone price inflation effect at first hand it might prefer to soldier on with its Exanet acquisition, Exanet being the crashed Israeli scale-out filer maker whose assets it bought.

Isilon is not saying it is shopping itself around - publicly, it is focussed on growing its own business.®