Western Digital (WD) Gold 12TB Hard Drive Review

Rating: 8.5.

Western Digital's Gold range of hard drives have been designed to service nearline enterprise environments and as such they have a range of sensors and technologies onboard to help them maintain peak performance in such environments. The latest Gold model launched has a 12TB capacity and is the new flagship drive for the range.

The 12TB Gold uses WD's 4th generation HelioSeal helium technology allowing eight 1.5TB platters and 16 heads to be built into an enclosure that is 26.1 mm high. Like all the Gold range it has a spin speed of 7,200rpm and comes with a 256MB cache. The 12TB drive currently sits at the top of range of seven drives starting at 1TB. The smaller capacity drives (1, 2, 4 and 6TB) have 128MB caches while the 8TB and 10TB models have 256MB of cache.

Quoted peak transfer rate for the drive is 255MB/s and WD claim a 550TB a year work load.

WD back the Gold range of drives with a 5 year warranty.

Physical Specifications:
Usable Capacities: 12TB
Spindle Speed: 7,200rpm
No. Of Heads: 16
No. Of Platters: 8
Cache: 256MB
Recording Method: Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR)
Interface: Serial ATA (SATA) 6Gb/s (SATA III)
Form Factor: 3.5in
Dimensions: 147 x 101.6 x 26.1mm
Drive Weight: 660g

Firmware Version: 01.01H01

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