WD expands Gold series enterprise HDDs with 18TB model

[Humza]

Bottom line: Western Digital doesn't elicit the most positive reaction from consumers as of late because of how the company staked its reputation by quietly selling slower SMR drives. However, for enterprise, it's a different story. The compnay's CMR-based Gold lineup is usually among its top sellers. Now, 16TB an 18TB Gold HDDs are set to launch, first in the UK then coming to the US.

Despite what's going on with WD in the consumer HDD space, it continues to expand its offerings for businesses and data centers. Clients with large storage demands can now look forward to WD's 16TB and 18TB models in its Gold lineup of SATA drives.

The 3.5-inch 7400 RPM Gold series use "conventional magnetic recording" (CMR) technology, and are built to withstand yearly operation (24x7x365) within the most demanding storage environments. WD also highlights enhanced reliability by specifying up to 2.5M hours of MTBF (Mean time between failures) for these drives.

As Tom's Hardware notes, both new capacity models are currently available with UK-based retailer, SPAN, and are yet to be listed on WD's official website. The 16TB version sells for £464 (~$580), while the 18TB costs £520 (~$650). Both models are expected to cost less when they become available in the US.

WD's Gold series scales up drive cache and data transfer rate with capacity. For reference, the 14TB model features a 512MB cache and is rated for 267MB/s of max sustained transfers. Although expectations won't be jumping significantly with the new 16TB and 18TB models, a slight increase in cache size and transfer rates is expected.

These specs, along with other info like power requirements and noise levels, will likely appear soon on WD's product brief. The company offers a 5-year warranty on all existing Gold models, and these new variants will likely ship with the same.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/85734-wd-expands-gold-series-enterprise-hdds-new-18tb.html

 

[VitalyT]

Funny fact though, you get two of those "18TB" drives in RAID 1, you end up with just 15.5TB of available space. This is what happens when a drive capacity is calculated by accountants.

These drives are a waste of money, unless you get 3+ drives in RAID 5, and connected via 10Gbe Ethernet. Only then it is a worthwhile investment.

 

[Soulburn74]

For those of us who have large media libraries or at home vm labs, these drives (large spinners) are a necessity...... (and running them in raid configuration is as well). The old (but they are labeled wrong size) is sad even a decade + later...... it seems the argument goes on deaf ears and will never be corrected.

 

[DaveBG]

Does it have SMR?

 

[Humza]

Does it have SMR?

The Gold series is entirely CMR-based. WD's product brief doesn't specify that, but they did mention it on their official blog.

https://blog.westerndigital.com/wd-gold-back-better-than-ever/

 

[BadThad]

Spinning drives need to go away forever. I understand their place (capacity) but mechanical drives just plain suck.

 

[umbala]

Spinning drives need to go away forever. I understand their place (capacity) but mechanical drives just plain suck.

Ok, and where do you propose we store our 60+TB of raw video footage that we need constant access to? I can tell you with great certainty that spinning drives are not going away anytime soon.

 

[Reehahs]

HDD with high storage capacity are plain scary to use on their own. It's like playing a data loss roulette.