WD Bolsters Its Gold Enterprise Hard Drive Lineup With New 10TB Model

WD has just expanded its enterprise hard drive lineup to include the WD Gold 10TB, a move the company says won’t just improve RoI, but performance, as well.

The Gold series of WD’s hard drives squarely target the enterprise space, as they’re designed to be used in servers – either stand-alone or rackmount – as well as storage enclosures. This means they can take the beating that enterprises can throw their way, and their increased durability means that they should live longer, to boot.

WD says that compared to its 8TB Gold drive, the 7200RPM 10TB Gold (WD101KRYZ) is up to 21% faster for sequential throughput (up to 249MB/s). That’s a stark improvement, and one I’d have to imagine would be attributed to larger platters being used; increase the areal density, and performance improvements will follow. The 256MB worth of cache might have a role to play, as well.

Performance is just one aspect of this new drive that has been improved: so too has the power efficiency been. WD says that this drive draws 8% less power than its 8TB Gold, which again is a notable difference, one that could be noticed if an enterprise were to deploy many such drives.

As an enterprise product, WD Gold drives include 24/7 customer support, and, as you’d probably expect, a five-year warranty. Price is to be determined, but the drives are expected to hit etailers like Amazon very soon.