A new hard drive is targeting the ever-growing amounts of cold data stored in the cloud.

Western Digital subsidiary WD has released its WD Ae line of hard disk drive (HDD) storage, designed to create a new tier of storage for large-scale cloud environments that the company has labelled "Tier 3".

With companies throwing more and more inactive data up into the cloud, WD’s WD Ae products are focused on reducing the TCO of cold data by using little power consumption and providing ready access to the archived information.

Matt Rutledge, senior VP of storage technology at WD, said: "Modern data centre customers came to us with a need for an HDD solution designed specifically for ever-expanding cold data repositories.

"WD is bringing the WD Ae drive to the broader market, representing another vital component of WD’s capacity storage portfolio."

The company estimates that cold, inactive data makes up 70% to 80% of all data.

Cold data comprises structured and unstructured data that is infrequently accessed, and WD hopes its HDD Ae solution will help IT departments speed up the archiving and retrieval times of such data compared to the capabilities of tape.

WD claimed its Ae line products all have capacities of more than 6TB, while its Progressive Capacity model allows them to reach their fullest available capacities of 6.1 TB, 6.2 TB, or 6.3 TB, for instance, as technology and manufacturing processes improve.

These incremental increases in capacity result in far greater capacity attainment through the life of a product platform, WD said.

It claimed this would be useful for data centre providers when it comes to improving their capacity-per-drive, capacity-per-volumetric space and reduced infrastructure overheads.

John Rydning, IDC VP for HDD research, said: "Cloud service providers have rapidly growing volumes of generally inactive data to store and manage, while at the same providing customers with access to the data at almost any time.

"WD’s new WD Ae line of HDDs is aimed directly at these storage use cases, and is helping to define a new, active archive enterprise storage sub-segment, thus opening new HDD storage opportunities for the HDD industry."

The WD Ae line is set for release in late 2014.