The 8TB WD Gold Datacenter Drive (WD8002FRYZ) Review

WD Gold Datacenter Drives

On April 20, 2016, Western Digital launched the new WD Gold family of hard disk drives. These hard disk drives are designed for maximum performance and reliability in the highly demanding conditions of a datacenter. In fact, they are rated to handle workloads of up to 550 TB per year (1.5 TB per day), with a MTBF rating of up to 2.5 million hours!

Today, we are going to take a look at the 8TB Western Digital Gold hard disk drive. This is one of the two helium-filled WD Gold models to feature a hermetically-sealed chassis with an internal helium environment. That’s not what’s different though. For your convenience, we created a specification comparison of the WD Gold family of datacenter drives :

Specifications10TB WD Gold8TB WD Gold6TB WD Gold4TB WD Gold
ModelWD101KRYZWD8002FRYZWD6002FRYZWD4002FYYZ
HelioSeal TechnologyYesYesNoNo
Advanced Format TechnologyYes (512-byte emulation)Yes (512-byte emulation)Yes (512-byte emulation)No
Spindle Speed7200 RPM7200 RPM7200 RPM7200 RPM
Cache256 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM128 MB SDRAM
Maximum Read / Write Speed249 MB/s205 MB/s226 MB/s201 MB/s
Sequential Read / Write Power Consumption7.1 W / 6.7 W7.2 W / 7.0 W9.3 W / 8.9 W9.0 W / 8.7 W
Random Read / Write Power Consumption6.8 W / 5.0 W7.4 W / 5.1 W9.1 W / 7.1 W8.8 W / 7.0 W
Acoustics (Seek / Idle)36 dBA / 20 dBA36 dBA / 20 dBA36 dBA / 29 dBA36 dBA / 29 dBA
MTBF (hours)2.5 million2.5 million2 million2 million
Warranty5 Years5 Years5 Years5 Years

Now, let’s check out the 8TB WD Gold datacenter hard disk drive!

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Unboxing The 8TB WD Gold Drive

The 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) hard disk drive came in a sealed antistatic plastic pack. Notably, it lacked the usual sachet of desiccants. That’s because the drive is hermetically-sealed in the factory, and filled with helium. Also notable is their use of two gold-coloured screws to lock the PCB in place.

To remove the drive, just tear off the top or cut it open, and slide out the drive. Be sure to ground yourself before removing and handling the hard disk drive as static can damage it. In particular, you should try to avoid touching the exposed PCB located on the lower underside of the drive.

Next Page > The 8TB WD Gold, HelioSeal & Media Caching Technologies

 

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