Synnex adds Western Digital SATA

System builder Synnex has signed up to distribute Western Digital to resellers across Australia.

Frank Sheu, MD at Synnex Australia, said the Victoria-based division of the global company would sell Western Digital's entire range. Synnex already distributed product from rival hard drive vendor Seagate and that relationship would continue, he said.

First cab off the Western Digital rank would be the US-based peripherals vendor's WD Raptor serial ATA portfolio, he said.

'They have very high capacity serial ATA IDE drives. Actually, the performance and reliability is the same as low-end SCSI drives for a good price,' Sheu said.

He hinted that Synnex had signed Western Digital with the education market in mind.

'One large educational tender in Queensland at the beginning of this year, the existing storage vendor lost the deal, a company that had that deal for about five years, and they lost to Western Digital,' Sheu said.

The deal had just been signed so Synnex wasn't yet up to speed with the entire range. However, the distributor would be adding Western Digital hardware as options for customers using the Melbourne build-to-order facility, he said.

Western Digital's 40GB and 80GB entry-level drives had larger built-in cache memory than those of many competitors, which meant users could access data more easily.

'They are probably still the largest in the US market and we believe they have very good products for our resellers,' Sheu said.

Western Digital has a number of channel partners in Australia and has been reportedly suffering supply problems overseas relating to its new Fluid Dynamic Beam (FDB) drive technology.

In the UK, it was reported in April that resellers had complained that orders for the FDB drives had not been filled fast enough. In some cases, other kinds of drives had been substituted for FDB drives without warning.

Sheu said he did not yet know whether FDB drives would be something Synnex would also be interested in sourcing from Western Digital.

Andrew Goh, a spokesperson for Western Digital in Singapore, was contacted for comment but had not returned calls by press time.

However, Tow Cheng Lim, a sales director for Western Digital in South Asia, said in a statement that the hardware vendor sought to expand its reach to enterprise system integrators as a result of the Synnex signing.