Western Digital colour-codes their hard disk drives not to make the drives look sexier, or to help sell more hard disk drives. They created the WD drive colours to help users understand the distinct advantages or use of each drive family. In this article, Western Digital will help us show you how to choose the best drive for your PC.
Every Drive Has A Purpose
There is no better person than Albert Chang, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at WD Asia Pacific, to explain why every drive has a purpose. He also points out a key point that users often forget to factor when consumers purchase a drive – the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
That’s right. The TCO is often overlooked, because that is ultimately the price you are paying over the lifetime of a drive. So make sure you don’t just buy the cheapest possible drive, because that may result in a high TCO… including the loss of priceless data.
Introducing The Five WD Drive Colours
Here is a quick primer on the five WD drive colours, and how they can help you determine the best drive for your PC.
Now, let’s take a closer look at each WD drive colour, and find out what advantages each drive colour boasts!
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WD Blue For Mainstream PCs
The WD Blue (Price Check) family are focused on offering highly-affordable drives with large storage capacities.
The WD Blue family does not just consist of hard disk drives. Western Digital also offers WD Blue SSHDs (solid state hybrid drives) and WD Blue SSDs (solid state drives).
For more information, you can read these WD Blue articles :
The WD Black family (Price Check) is targeted at power users and gamers who want the fastest possible hard disk drives for their PCs.
The WD Black drives offer a much higher spindle speed, a very large cache, and a fast processor. For more information, you can read these WD Black articles :
The WD Red (Price Check) family of NAS drives is specifically designed for the “always on” environment of a NAS enclosure. They run cooler and vibrate less, greatly increasing their reliability and lifespan in NAS enclosures.
The WD Red drives are also optimised for NAS usage patterns (80% reads, 20% writes), so you will be able to access your files faster than with a regular hard disk drive.
For more information, you can read these WD Red articles :
WD Purple drives (Price Check) are designed to handle the high-temperature, “always-on” environment of the CCTV and DVR systems. Regular drives will fail quickly under such conditions.
They are also designed to handle multiple video streams without dropped frames, or gaps in recorded footage… and do this 24/7 without rest!
For more information on the WD Purple, and why it is the best drive for surveillance and CCTV systems, please read :
Qualified for nearline storage use in datacenters, datacenter hard disk drives like WD Gold (Price Check) are designed to offer high storage capacities at maximum performance and reliability while operating continuously 24 hours a day in large drive arrays.
So if you want nothing but the best drive to secure your company’s data, there can be no doubt that the WD Gold (Price Check) is the ultimate storage solution.
For more information, you can read these WD Gold articles :
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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 :
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.
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The 8TB WD Gold Datacenter Drive
Despite featuring a hermetically-sealed chassis, the 8TB WD Gold (WD8002FRYZ) datacenter drive looks deceptively like any other 3.5″ desktop hard disk drive. In fact, it has the same label on the top plate, with an uncovered PCB on the underside.
The label has a lot of important information, like the hard drive model, storage capacity as well as its date and place of manufacture. This particular drive was manufactured in Thailand on the 26th of March, 2016. You can also see that the drive uses the Advanced Format Technology to achieve its high storage density.
HelioSeal Technology
The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is one of the few hard disk drives in the market to feature the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology. It is hermetically sealed at the factory, and filled with helium. The hole, which normally serves as the breather hole in a normal “air-filled” hard disk drive, is likely the port through which the air is extracted and replaced with helium.
Because helium is only 1/7th the density of “regular air”, it allows for less friction conferring the following benefits :
The lower friction reduces the amount of power required to spin the platters, reducing both energy costs and thermal output.
Internal turbulence is greatly reduced, which makes tracking more precise and reliable. This indirectly allows for greater areal density.
The lower power requirement and internal turbulence allow more platters and heads to be added in the same volume of space.
The completely sealed environment eliminates reliability issues that can occur if breather filters get clogged up with dirt.
The only things stopping helium-filled drives from becoming mainstream are the relatively high cost of helium, and the difficulty in sealing the drive.
Media Caching Technology
This feature was mentioned only perfunctorily in the Western Digital press release, which led many writers to assume that they added a NAND flash cache, like the ones used in SSHDs (examples : 4TB WD Blue SSHD, 1TB WD Blue SSHD). Unfortunately, that’s not true.
The media caching technology used in the WD Gold datacenter drives are also a HGST technology, like HelioSeal. It doesn’t use any additional components, just the existing SDRAM cache and the hard disk drive platters. This is how it works :
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Small media cache areas are created in regular intervals across the platters. These are only visible to the drive controller, and are hidden to the computer and operating system.
Data written to the SDRAM cache are combined and regularly written down to the nearest media cache areas at a higher internal queue depth.
These dispersed media cache areas boost write performance by greatly reducing head movements as data is written to the drive.
The write data is simultaneously de-staged, which eliminates burst activity and their impact on reads from the platters.
In the event of a sudden power-off event, the media cache areas is used to quickly restore the SDRAM cache.
Generally, the media caching technology increases random write performance with a slight boost in read performance.
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SATA 6 Gb/s
This is a Serial ATA drive, with native support for SATA 6 Gb/s. However, it is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 3 Gb/s controllers.
The SATA 6 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive boasts a maximum sustained internal (platter-to-buffer) transfer rate of 205 MB/s, and a large and fast DDR3 SDRAM cache.
Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this hard disk drive to the server, computer or NAS while it’s still running.
What’s Under The PCB?
Western Digital has a penchant for keeping all surface-mounted components on the reverse side of the PCB – to prevent static damage and to allow for better cooling. The PCB is protected by a thin foam cutout on the chassis side, with a thermal pad to help transfer heat from the HDD controller to the hard disk drive chassis.
The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive uses the LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller, and the ST Microelectronics L7229 motor drive controller, which features their proprietary Smooth Drive pseudo-sinusoidal digital drive technology.
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The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive boasts a large 128 MB SDRAM cache, courtesy of a Samsung K4B1G1646G-BCK0 chip. This is a DDR3-1600 SDRAM chip with 8 memory banks and timings of 11-11-11. This gives it a peak transfer rate of 400 MB/s.
Finally, the 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive has two shock sensors that allow it to better detect shock and vibration events, and dynamically adjust the flying height of the read/write heads to avoid head crashes.
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We tested in both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, with the latest updates. We chose to use IO Meter 2008 as well as our “old faithful”, WinBench 99 2.0, with the following tests :
Platter Data Transfer Profile
Business Disk WinMark 99
High-End Disk WinMark 99
Disk Transfer Rate (Beginning)
Disk Transfer Rate (End)
Business Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on three office application suites – Microsoft Office 97, Lotus SmartSuite and Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, as well as a web browser, Netscape Navigator. They are quite dated, but should still reflect the usage patterns of users in an office environment using such applications. The test runs through a script that keeps multiple applications open, while it performs tasks that switches between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The result is the average transfer rate during the script run.
High-End Disk WinMark 99 is a real-world simulation based on AVS/Express 3.4, FrontPage 98, MicroStation SE, Photoshop 4.0, Premiere 4.2, Sound Forge 4.0 and Visual C++ 5.0. However, it differs by running the applications serially, instead of simultaneously. There are individual results for each application but in this comparison, we will be looking only at the weighted average score, which is the average transfer rate during the tests.
Unfortunately, WinBench 99 is not fully compatible with Microsoft Windows 7, registering a SetFilePointer error in the Disk Access Time test. So, we were not able to obtain any Disk Access Time results.
In addition, it would keep crashing if the hard drive was tested with a single partition. This is likely due to a limit on the size of the partition that is supported by WinBench 99. We came up with a workaround by dividing the hard disk drive into 5 partitions of equal sizes. We then tested each partition individually and averaged the results.
The WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive has an official formatted capacity of 8,001,563,222,016 bytes. We checked that out by formatting it in NTFS using Microsoft Windows 7.
The actual formatted capacity was 8,001,427,599,360 bytes, which is about 136 MB lower than the official storage capacity. With about 338 MB allocated to the NTFS file system, the actual usable capacity remained slightly above 8 TB.
Platter Profile
As expected from a premium, datacenter-grade hard disk drive, the platter profile of the WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive was phenomenal. There were absolutely zero dips in throughput that would signify a significant use of replacement sectors. Lots of them would be evidence of poor platter quality.
We also compared its platter profile to that of the 6TB WD Black – Western Digital’s top-of-the-line desktop hard disk drive. We can see that the denser platters allow the 6TB WD Black to achieve a higher throughput initially, but the 8TB WD Gold equalised it at around the 3.5TB point.
We monitored the surface temperature of seven hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.
This reduced thermal output (and power consumption) is a key advantage of helium-filled hard disk drives like the 8TB WD Gold drive. When deployed in the hundreds or thousands in a datacenter, the lower energy costs of running them, and keeping them cool, will be very significant.
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Transfer Rate Range
This chart shows you the range of platter-to-buffer transfer rates from the innermost track to the outermost track. In other words, it shows you the range of disk transfer rates of the hard disk drives (from minimum to maximum).
The 8TB WD Gold drive has an official peak throughput of 205 MB/s, which was confirmed by our tests. In fact, it actually peaked at 209 MB/s. While that puts it ahead of most of the competition, it was still slower than the 6TB WD Black.
This is because the 8TB WD Gold uses platters with slightly lower areal density (about 1,142 GB per platter) than the 6TB WD Black, which boasts 1,200 GB per platter.
Business Disk WinBench 99
The 8TB WD Gold datacenter drive is not optimised for desktop applications, so it’s no wonder that it isn’t the fastest drive in this test. Even so, the 8TB Gold datacenter drive did reasonably well, coming within 12% of the 6TB WD Black.
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Check out the incredible boost in the random write speed, especially for small random writes. The 8TB WD Gold delivered almost double the performance of the 6TB WD Black drive in small random writes, and a 10% boost in performance in large random writes.
This is the key advantage of the HGST media caching technology that Western Digital included into the 8TB WD Gold. This is a tremendous performance advantage in file storage servers that serve hundreds or thousands of users.
Random Access Time
Test
WD Gold (8 TB)
WD Black (6 TB)
Difference
512 KB Read
16.45 ms
16.39 ms
+ 0.3%
512 KB Write
16.73 ms
18.36 ms
– 8.9%
4 KB Read
12.81 ms
12.79 ms
+ 0.1%
4 KB Write
5.54 ms
10.50 ms
– 47.3%
As you can see, the HGST media caching technology truly has a significant effect on performance. It cut down the random access time, even though that’s a limitation imposed by physics.
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Random CPU Utilization
Test
WD Gold (8 TB)
WD Black (6 TB)
Difference
512 KB Read
0.56 %
0.60 %
– 6.7%
512 KB Write
0.57 %
0.62 %
– 8.1%
4 KB Read
0.35 %
0.43 %
– 18.6%
4 KB Write
0.53 %
0.37 %
+ 43.2%
The LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is definitely more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black. The extra processing power was certainly useful in handling the extra media caching duty.
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The WD Gold 8TB datacenter drive uses less dense platters, so its sequential throughput is understandably lower than that of the 6TB Western Digital Black. That would account for about a 5% deficit in performance, with the rest due to the drive being optimised for random writes.
In fact, we can see here that the HGST media caching technology actually results in a large drop in small sequential write performance.
Sequential Access Time
Test
WD Gold (8 TB)
WD Black (6 TB)
Difference
512 KB Read
2.50 ms
2.32 ms
+ 7.8%
512 KB Write
2.51 ms
2.29 ms
+ 9.4%
4 KB Read
0.04 ms
0.04 ms
+ 4.2%
4 KB Write
0.08 ms
0.05 ms
+ 56.4%
No surprises here. The 8TB WD Gold is optimised for small random writes, not small sequential writes.
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Sequential CPU Utilization
Test
WD Gold (8 TB)
WD Black (6 TB)
Difference
512 KB Read
1.25 %
1.33%
– 6.0%
512 KB Write
1.41 %
1.50%
– 6.0%
4 KB Read
8.66 %
8.95%
– 3.2%
4 KB Write
8.59 %
9.23%
– 6.9%
Again, we can see that the LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is more powerful than the LSI TT07143 controller used in the 6TB Western Digital Black.
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The LSI 7101B hard disk drive controller used in the 8TB WD Gold is definitely faster than the LSI TT07143 controller use in the 6TB WD Black. However, you can see that Western Digital optimised it for random write performance. Together with the HGST Media Caching Technology, it trades some random read performance, for a big boost in random write performance, particularly in small, random writes.
If you like our work, you can help support our work by visiting our sponsors, participating in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donating to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!
If you like our work, you can help support our work by visiting our sponsors, participating in the Tech ARP Forums, or even donating to our fund. Any help you can render is greatly appreciated!
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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Hard disk drives have evolved into many distinct families to cater to different requirements – performance, low cost storage, NAS, surveillance, etc. They often emphasise one attribute over others, to meet the requirements of their target market, while keeping costs low. But what if you wanted nothing but the best in hard disk drive technology? That’s where datacenter-grade hard disk drives like WD Gold come in.
Qualified for nearline storage use in datacenters, datacenter hard disk drives like WD Gold (Lowest Price) are designed to offer high storage capacities at maximum performance and reliability while operating continuously 24 hours a day. Virtually no expense is spared in making these drives the gold standard in HDD technology. That is likely why Western Digital gave their datacenter drives the WD Gold moniker.
Let’s take a quick look at why the WD Gold drives are the best hard disk drives in the industry.
Industry-Leading Storage Capacity
The WD Gold (lowest price on Amazon) is available in storage capacities from just 1 TB, all the way to the industry-leading storage capacity of 10 TB.
Unlike desktop-grade performance hard disk drives, the WD Gold (Lowest Price) is designed for peak performance at all times. While they may be classified as datacenter hard disk drives, the WD Gold drives can certainly be used in any desktop or consumer system.
On top of a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, the WD Gold also boasts a large (128 MB or 256 MB) SDRAM cache, and the HGST Media Caching Technology. They both help to sustain a high read and write throughput from the WD Gold drives.
Less Noise & Vibration, Lower Power Consumption
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The WD Gold (Lowest Price) is built around the revolutionary HGST HelioSeal technology, which seals the drive and fills it with helium. Because it is only 1/7th the density of “regular air”, helium imparts the following advantages to the WD Gold drives :
less friction for the spinning platters, reducing power consumption and thermal output
less internal turbulence, allowing for more reliable head-to-platter tracking
more capacity because more platters and drive heads can be fitted in the same volume of space
the completely sealed environment eliminates reliability issues from outside contaminants
24×7 Reliability
The WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives are designed to handle high workloads (up to 550 TB per year) continuously for years. They boast a phenomenal mean time before failure (MTBF) of 2.5 million hours. That is partly due to vibration control technologies like the Enhanced RAFF (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) technology, and extensive testing.
To ensure the best possible 24×7 reliability, the WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives undergo rigorous tests in the factory before they are certified for use. They are also extensively tested with a wide variety of systems, controllers and adapters to ensure maximum compatibility and ease-of-installation into any storage system.
Our Choice
The WD Gold (lowest price on Amazon) is designed for the most arduous and demanding conditions in the datacenter, but it doesn’t mean you can’t use it in a less-demanding desktop environment. In fact, tech enthusiasts who want nothing but the best hard disk drive and can afford to pay for the bespoke quality, can buy and use the WD Gold in their desktops or even NAS systems!
We tested the WD Gold extensively in our 10-page review, and came away very impressed with its performance. It was not just fast, it was also quiet and it ran really cool. That is why we awarded it our Reviewer’s Choice Award.
Now, the lower cost of ownership may not matter much for a desktop user with a couple of WD Gold drives, but it matters a great deal if you are running a datacenter with tens of thousands of servers. The WD Gold (Lowest Price) drives will not just reduce downtime from drive failures, they will greatly reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership).
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15 August 2016 – Western Digital Corporation today announced a new, high-capacity configuration of up to 10TB for its award-winning WD Gold datacenter hard drives. Designed for modern enterprise storage systems, 10TB WD Gold datacenter hard drives feature HelioSeal helium-technology for high capacity, power efficient storage for datacenter environments.
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. 10TB WD Gold datacenter hard drives feature an optimized design over the existing WD Gold 8TB drives that helps reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of servers and storage systems through an 8 percent operating power reduction while delivering 25 percent more capacity. This benefits IT administrators challenged with keeping up with growing storage demands on limited budgets.
“It is Western Digital’s on-going goal to provide superior reliability and compelling value to the our enterprise customers,” said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, Western Digital. “WD Gold drives are a key component of the overall WD portfolio, providing power efficient, capacity-optimized storage for a wide range of high workload applications. The new 10TB capacity enables customers to efficiently deploy higher density storage solutions.”
10TB WD Gold datacenter hard drives provide:
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Improved power efficiency – HelioSeal Technology delivers lower power with an increase in capacity. Power efficiency (watts/TB) during operation is improved up to 26 percent over the WD Gold 8TB drive.
Better performance – Up to 21 percent sequential performance improvement over WD Gold 8TB datacenter drives
High reliability – WD Gold drives incorporate 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 and 10TB offerings)
Dedicated Premium Support Line– Western Digital offers a 24/7 premium support line for WD Gold drive customers and can be reached at U.S.: (855) 559-3733; International: +80055593733.
10TB WD Gold hard drives (model number WD101KRYZ) are currently available at select retailers and distributed by Eternal Asia (M) Sdn Bhd in Malaysia. The Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the 10TB WD Gold is RM3,499 / ~US$ 875.
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20 April 2016 — Western Digital Corporation 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.
“Western Digital has a proven history of providing award-winning purpose-driven products for unique requirements of each application environment, like WD Red, WD Purple and WD Blue drives,” said Brendan Collins vice president of product marketing, Western Digital Corporation. “WD Gold is a pinnacle part of the color portfolio strategy and another step in creating optimized drives for the markets we serve. Our continued goal is to deliver the most competitive and reliable solutions on the market.”
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.
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