Page 10 : Our Verdict & Award, Lowest Prices, Specifications

Our Verdict & Award

This is our first review of a helium-filled hard disk drive, and we are very impressed. Even from its specifications alone, we can already see a significant reduction in power consumption and noise levels. These are not minor either.

The helium-filled 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) datacenter drive boasts 22% lower power consumption, and is half as loud as the air-filled WD Gold models when they are not seeking. We confirmed these claims during our tests, noting how quiet it was, and how it ran almost as cool as 5400 RPM hard disk drives despite packing 3-4 additional platters than the drives we compared it to!

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive achieves its tremendous storage capacity, not by increasing areal density, but by packing 2 additional platters. This is only made possible by filling it with helium, reducing turbulence and friction.

While this allows Western Digital to quickly increase storage capacity, it doesn’t help with its performance. That’s why it was slightly slower than top-of-the-line desktop drives like the 6TB Western Digital Black. That doesn’t meant that the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is a slow drive. Far from it. It is a fast drive, but not in the way we expect.

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is optimised for datacenter applications. Hence, it features the HGST media caching technology which trades sequential write performance for a big boost in its small random write performance. This is not a very useful trade-off for desktop users, but a big boon to servers that handle hundreds or thousands of users.

The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive would be overkill for home or office users, even for NAS applications. But there is no doubt that it would offer a big boost in performance and a tremendous reduction in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), considering its significantly lower power consumption and thermal output per TB of storage. In light of that, we think the WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive deserves no less than our Reviewer’s Choice Award! Congratulations, Western Digital!

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The 8TB WD Gold Specifications

Specifications	WD Gold 8TB Datacenter Hard Disk Drive
Model	WD8002FRYZ
Form Factor	3.5 inch
Platter And Head Count	7 Platters with 14 Read/Write Heads
Advanced Format Technology	Yes (512-byte emulation)
Available Sectors	15,628,053,168 (512-byte emulation) sectors 1,953,506,646 (4,096-byte physical) sectors
Formatted Capacity	8,001,563,222,016 bytes
Native Command Queuing	Yes
Interface	SATA 6 Gb/s
Spindle Speed	7200 RPM
Sustained read / write performance	205 MB/s (maximum)
Cache	128 MB DDR3-1600 SDRAM
Average Power Consumption	Sequential read : 7.2 W Sequential write : 7.0 W Random read / write : 7.4 W Idle : 5.1 W
Temperature Rating	5 to 60 °C (Operating) -40 to 70 °C (Non-Operating)
Shock Rating	Operating : 70 G (half-sine wave, 2 ms) Non-Operating : 300 G (half-sine wave, 1 ms) / 150 G (half-sine wave, 11 ms)
Acoustics	Seek : 36 dBA (average) Idle : 20 dBA
Load / Unload Cycles	600,000
Non-Recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read	<1 in 1015
MTBF (Maximum Time Before Failure)	2,500,000 hours
AFR (Average Failure Rate)	0.35%
Warranty	5 Years
Physical Dimensions	101.6 mm (4.0") wide x 147.0 mm (5.787") long x 26.1 mm (1.028") high
Weight	650 g (1.43 lbs)

 

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