Western Digital Announces the WD Gold Hard Drives

[btarunr]

Western Digital Corporation, a world leader in storage solutions, 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. WD Gold drives are currently available at select U.S. distributors, resellers and through the WD Store.

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."

WD Gold datacenter hard drives include:

• Improved power efficiency - New electronics enhance power efficiency up to 15 percent1. HelioSeal technology enables up to 26 percent lower power consumption2
• 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. WD Gold model numbers:
  o 8TB: WD8002FRYZ
  o 6TB: WD6002FRYZ
  o 4TB: WD4002FYYZ

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[rtwjunkie]

This can't be new. I've been seeing the gold line of HDD on Newegg for the past year at least.

 

[RejZoR]

HelioSeal featured in a WD drive? This must be a first one. Till now it was HGST only feature.

 

[v12dock]

I wonder there prices over the Re drives

 

[silentbogo]

HelioSeal featured in a WD drive? This must be a first one. Till now it was HGST only feature.

HGST is a WD subsidiary for quite few years now (formerly known as Hitachi Global Storage Tech.)

 

[Octavean]

HelioSeal featured in a WD drive? This must be a first one. Till now it was HGST only feature.

I believe the first HelioSeal WD "branded" drive I came across was the new WD Red 8TB HDD which is almost identical to the HGST Ultrastar He8. The similarities made it obvious that the companies had partnered in some way on the tech or acquisitions were made.

 

[ironwolf]

Price check on Newegg:

WD4002FYYZ (3rd party seller): ~$294-$318 (+applicable shipping)

Amazon:

WD8002FRYZ: ~$665 (+applicable shipping)
WD6002FRYZ: ~$511.22 (+applicable shipping)
WD4002FYYZ: ~$212.44 (+applicable shipping)

For those who have seen the Gold drives before, Amazon shows a bunch of other model #'s for some of these drives, ending in stuff like FSYZ, F9YZ and even a 2TB WD2000FYYZ.

 

[Static~Charge]

This can't be new. I've been seeing the gold line of HDD on Newegg for the past year at least.

You've been seeing the RE and Se drives, which also have a gold label.

Here's a full price comparison of 4TB Western Digital drives from Newegg:

$114.99 -- WD Blue 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40EZRZ
$149.99 -- WD Purple 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40PURX
$149.99 -- WD Red 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40EFRX
$195.00 -- WD RE 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4001FYYG
$196.99 -- WD Black 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4003FZEX
$214.99 -- WD Se 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4000F9YZ
$244.40 -- WD Red Pro 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4002FFWX
$294.11 -- WD Gold 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4002FYYZ

 

[FordGT90Concept]

I really hate how they market so many brands of HDDs these days. I preferred the days where you could break it down by RPM (5400, 7200, 10k, 15k) and environment (consumer/enterprise). I could see needing to distinguish between helium and not but this is getting beyond ridiculous where you have NAS, consumer, enterprise, datacenter, and surveillance all at the same RPM (e.g. 7200). Is there really enough technical differences to distinguish between that many types? This reminds me of Windows Vista/7 where there are 5+ different versions. I used to like shopping for HDDs because it was pretty quick and easy to find the right drive. Now it is tedious because you have to look up what the different branding means for each of the manufacturers in order to compare price on a level playing ground. It's ridiculous.

You've been seeing the RE and Se drives, which also have a gold label.

Here's a full price comparison of 4TB Western Digital drives from Newegg:

$114.99 -- WD Blue 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40EZRZ
$149.99 -- WD Purple 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40PURX
$149.99 -- WD Red 4TB, 5400 RPM, model WD40EFRX
$195.00 -- WD RE 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4001FYYG
$196.99 -- WD Black 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4003FZEX
$214.99 -- WD Se 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4000F9YZ
$244.40 -- WD Red Pro 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4002FFWX
$294.11 -- WD Gold 4TB, 7200 RPM, model WD4002FYYZ

See! OMFG![/ragequit]

 

[Owen1982]

Agreed. Too many colours!

Defeats the point of colour coding your product lines if there are so many bloody colours no one can remember them.

I'm guessing Mystic blue or Blurple next... sparkly orange?

People - stop feeding WD your money...there are too many colours damn it!

 

[FordGT90Concept]

It's not just WD though. Seagate is guilty of this too but at least they use names that actually mean something (e.g. Desktop SSHD, Desktop HDD, NAS HDD where "Barracuda" is the 7200 RPM model).

That said, look at this page:
http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/desktop-hard-drives/desktop-hdd/#specs
[/ragequit]

It has become the industry norm.

 

[AsRock]

Gold sounds errm so cheesy.

 

[Frick]

What about warranty?

I really hate how they market so many brands of HDDs these days. I preferred the days where you could break it down by RPM (5400, 7200, 10k, 15k) and environment (consumer/enterprise). I could see needing to distinguish between helium and not but this is getting beyond ridiculous where you have NAS, consumer, enterprise, datacenter, and surveillance all at the same RPM (e.g. 7200). Is there really enough technical differences to distinguish between that many types? This reminds me of Windows Vista/7 where there are 5+ different versions. I used to like shopping for HDDs because it was pretty quick and easy to find the right drive. Now it is tedious because you have to look up what the different branding means for each of the manufacturers in order to compare price on a level playing ground. It's ridiculous.


See! OMFG![/ragequit]

So much this. I asked the WD rep here about it some time ago about the technical differences, but I didn't hear anything.

 

[InhaleOblivion]

Another color....lawl.

 

[Toothless]

Man, wheres the rainbow 80TB SSD for the price of your first born to be forced into hard labor?

 

[Prima.Vera]

Yeah, having 1 million type of HDDs only confuses the average users even more. Heck, I have some colleagues in the office that just gave up, said"fuck it", and went for the SSDs instead.