Western Digital (WD) Gold 12TB Hard Drive Review

1. Introduction2. WD Gold 12TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. IOMETER7. Throughput8. Workload Scenarios9. Real Life File Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

The Western Digital 12TB Gold is the latest and currently largest capacity drive in WD's drive range aimed at the enterprise market where the demands for increased storage density are growing ever larger. The Gold range of drives have a number of built in technologies to help them survive 24 x 7 365 days a year in the most demanding storage situations and to this end have a 2.5m hour MTBF rating. The drive uses WD's 4th generation HelioSeal helium technology. Since its inception HelioSeal has been used in over 15 million (and counting) shipped drives.

Helium technology has allowed drive manufacturers to produce larger capacity drives thanks to its property of being 1/7th the density of air, reducing the internal turbulence and friction on the platters, actuating arms and heads. The reduction of turbulence inside the enclosure means that more platters and heads can be built in the same internal space.

Another benefit of the reduced friction is lower thermals and power consumption, so not only are these disks much larger than previous generations, they are also cheaper to run per gigabyte of storage in power consumption terms, a very important attribute in the environments they are aimed at.

To help keep the drive protected against vibration in large multi disk housings Western Digital have the drive spindle attached at the top and bottom of the drive. The drives also have enhanced RAFF technology which monitors the drive and corrects, in real time, rotational vibrations to improve drive stability.

DFH (Dynamic Fly Height) technology ensures that the fly height of each read/write head on the dual-stage head actuator's are adjusted in real time for consistent, reliable performance. TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) comes into focus in RAID arrays and helps to reduce time lost to drive fallout due to excessively long error recovery times.

The 12TB Gold drive is power efficient and performs the neat trick of using less power through every stage of its use than the 6TB Gold model. Average power requirements for the Sequential Read/Writes is 7W and 6.8W respectively, for the 6TB model it's 9.3W and 8.9W respectively.

Random Read/Write average power for the 12TB drive is 6.9W (9.1W for the 6TB drive) with the 12TB drive using 2.1W less power when in idle mode; 5.0W than the 7.1W of the 6TB drive.

We found the 12TB WD Gold available to pre-order on Overclockers UK for £489.95 (inc VAT) HERE

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Pros

• Overall Performance.
• Performance protecting technologies.
• 5-year warranty.

Cons.

• Its not cheap but then it is aimed at the enterprise segment.

Kitguru says: WD's Gold 12TB offers huge capacity with good overall performance with plenty of onboard technoloiges to help it survive in its intended environment.

 

 

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