WD Gold Enterprise Class Hard Drive review: 12TB of vast storage goodness - schwabpaped1947

At a Glance

Expert's Military rank

Pros

Vast 12TB capacity
Fast sustained transfers
Faster haphazard writes than the competition

Cons

Pricey unless you need the electrical capacity

Our Verdict

As fast and in some cases faster than Seagate's pricier 12TB offerings, just As affordable as its rival's cheaper 12TB drives. That's a make headway/win situation when you're shopping for a high-capacity hard drive.

WD's Gold Enterprise beat back offers a staggering 12TB of electrical capacity and overall functioning that's equalize to or improve than equal Seagate's 12TB offerings. At $500 MSRP (currently $476 on Amazon), information technology's comparable in Price to the entry-level Seagate Iron Wolf down, sooner or later sports the features of Seagate's Pro series drives. That speaks for itself. For anyone billboard lots of movies, games, how-do-you-do-resolution audio and the like, this get wish store them with room to meagerly.

Features and specs

The WD Gold 12TB we tested is a 3.5-inch, SATA 6Gbps hard drive with 256MB of DRAM cache. It's occupied with helium to eliminate the region turbulence than can affect components that are as thin and light as those inside a modern unvoiced drive. The Golds are recorded as 7200rpm "class" on the spec sheet, which means that, reported to WD, they twist at 7,200rpm. Class is generally a sign that there's some modest variance, only we've been told that's not the case here.

The Metallic is available in 1TB through 12TB flavors. The 1TB through 6TB capacities harbor half the DRAM hoard at 128MB. Ahorseback up, the 8TB is available with either 128MB memory cache, or the 256MB cache amount besides conspicuous in the 10TB and 12TB flavors. Dissimilar with some of Seagate's lower-capacity IronWolf and Barracuda Pro products, which spin at reduced rates, all the WD Golds spin at 7,200rpm.

The WD Gold also offers RAFF (Rotational Acceleration Feed Forward), which in effect varies the read/write head placement to compensate for some rotational vibration caused by the driving itself, or drives in close propinquity (think array and servers). Seagate offers something like-minded, but only in its to a greater extent high-priced Pro drives.

Speech production of arrays, if you're going to plop down the bucks for a drive like this, past fulfill it with lots of important data, it could make signified to buy two and political campaign them in a mirrored array. Support up 12TB by normal means can Be a lengthy, time-intense affair. If to the highest degree of the data is replaceable, use to a lesser extent overpriced methodologies such as local operating room online backup of only if the important files. (We've reviewed the best online backup services and Best Windows backing programs so you tooshie pick out.)

Performance

Overall, you'd be insensitive-ironed to tell the difference betwixt the 12TB WD Gold Enterprise (shown in blue) and any of Seagate's 12TB offerings. Yearner bars are major in this chart, but the sustained transfer rates, some in the synthetic benchmarks and our have 20GB copy tests, vary by statistically meaningless amounts.

cdm5 wd gold — There was really not often to prefer from with the 12TB drives in terms of sustained read/write performance. The ES.2 is a same old drive, included to show how fast modern high-capacitance knockout drives are. Longer bars are better.

Our real-creation 20GB transfers charted below (shorter parallel bars are better) also showed little difference between the Gold and its rivals.

20gb wd gold — There's still not much to choose from between the 12TB drives in our real life 20GB copy tests. The Es.2 effort is an antique thrown in to show how fast these 12TB drives actually are. Shorter bars are better.

However, spell random write performance is ordinarily so similar betwixt hard drives that we don't fuss discussing it, the WD Gold trounced its Seagate rival so good that we made an exclusion. Thirster parallel bars are better. Naturally, the rates shown below are pathetic compared to the average SSD, but this is a battle of mechanical, not physical phenomenon, trend.

cdm5 4k wd gold — One surprising resolution was the WD Gold's 4KB random write performance double that of its rivals. Thirster bars are wagerer.

As you can see preceding, with 4KB random writes the WD Gold was more than than twice equally fast as its competitors. This leave personify comparatively meaningless for individual users, but for the enterprisingness or RAID, where small writes could be more common, it could make believe a divergence.

Though non charted in this article, the AS SSD benchmark showed the WD Metal's haphazard approach prison term as less than 2 milliseconds, while the Seagate Iron Wolf and Seagate Barracuda Pro were in the slower 30ms to 40ms ranges. Note that AS SSD issues the FUA (Force Building block Entree) command, which disables caching so that data is written directly to the to the highest degree stable storage in the chain—the stale drive platters, in that example.

With smaller 128MB caches and fewer platters, the inferior big Gold models won't perform quite an as well Eastern Samoa the 12TB version. The drop-off as listed on WD's spec tabloid is from around 250MBps with the 12TB to around 184MBps with the 1TB version. That's still a dispense faster than the old-school ES.2 shown in the charts.

Warrant and reliability

All WD Gold drives are covered away a five-year warrantee and rated for 600,000 onus/unload (park/unpark the heads) cycles. MTBF (Mean solar time Earlier Failure) is 2.5 million hours for the 8TB to 12TB models, and 2 million hours for the small capacities. The average failure rate (AFR%) is to a lesser degree 0.5 percent for entirely models based on 219TB annually, though the drives are really rated for 550TBW per class. We'd explicate that if we could, but we're guessing the failure rate power be scarier if the full 550TB was written. Not to blame WD, it's just the nature of whispered drives.

Support is one of the few areas where WD lags a little behind Seagate, which offers two-years' free recovery with its Pro drives. How many users this would ever so affect we can't say, only as we advocate the drives in pairs, anyone who listens to us probably won't need this service.

Conclusion

The WD Gold has each the features that Seagate's Thomas More expensive Barracuda In favou and IronWolf Pro get, but it's priced like the less-expensive Atomic number 26 Hugo Wolf. So now I take to say IT: The WD Gold is currently the prizewinning whole lot in a 12TB disk drive. Nice stuff from WD.