Planning to build your own data center? Well, now’s a great time! WD has just announced their new “Gold” line of HDDs. These 8TB monsters are helium-sealed, meaning that they offer a significant advantage over the usual servings. Also, these drives are clocked to serve at 2.5 Million hours, or roughly 285 years.
We were actually teased about it during their last event but the speaker was adamant with keeping the name anonymous (despite pictures showing gold labels). More of the Press Release below:
Western Digital Corporation (NASDAQ: WDC), a world leader in storage solutions, today announced the expansion of its award-winning color portfolio with a new line; WD Gold™ datacenter hard drives. WD Gold datacenter hard drives are designed for a broad range of applications – including small- to medium-scale enterprise servers and storage, and rack-mount datacenter servers and storage enclosures.
With purpose-driven designs for the datacenter, WD Gold datacenter hard drives are launching with a new, high-capacity configuration of up to 8TB that offers HelioSeal® helium-technology for performance, ideal capacity per square foot, power efficiency and low power consumption for datacenter environments. WD Gold datacenter hard drives feature an optimized design with an 8TB option that helps reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of servers and storage systems, benefiting IT administrators challenged with growing storage capacity needs on limited budgets. WD Gold hard drives will also include a premium dedicated support line for customers worldwide.
WD Gold datacenter hard drives include:
• Improved power efficiency – New electronics enhance power efficiency up to 15 percent . HelioSeal technology enables up to 26 percent lower power consumption
• Better performance – Up to 18 percent sequential performance improvement over previous generation WD Re™ 4TB datacenter drives, and up to 30 percent improvement in random write performance over previous generation WD Re 6TB datacenter drives through media-based cache, and up to 3x improvement over competitive offerings
• High reliability – WD Gold incorporates best-of-breed design, manufacturing and test processes to achieve one of the highest reliability ratings in the industry – 2.5 million hours MTBF (8TB offering)
• Dedicated Premium Support Line and WD Gold Model Numbers – Western Digital offers a 24/7 premium support line for WD Gold customers and can be reached at U.S.: (855) 559-3733; International: +80055593733. WD Gold model numbers: • 8TB: WD8002FRYZ • 6TB: WD6002FRYZ
• 4TB: WD4002FYYZ