WD GOLD 12TB 3.5-Inch Datacenter Hard Disk Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

I couldn’t find the WD Gold 12TB Datacenter HDD in the UK at the time of review, but the smaller 10TB is available for £350.09. In the US, the 12TB WD Gold can be yours for $532.99 at the time of writing.

Conclusion

There can be no doubt that Western Digital’s WD Gold 12TB Datacenter hard disk is an awesome drive. The benchmark results speak for themselves and put the drive at the top in most of our charts. Considering that this is the flagship HDD, it’s no surprise. You get a faster performance than the black series, a better reliability than the red series, and generally a better drive.

WD equipped the Gold series with some great features such as the dual-stage actuator head positioning system, but also the awesome TLER feature which is worth gold in a critical setup. It is a RAID feature as such, but that’s also the situation for which these drives are intended. You’ll rarely see a single drive setup with this series, that’s for sure. Other features include dynamic fly height for the heads and real-time anti-vibration technology. All important features in a multi-disk setup.

I don’t think we need to touch the looks as such. This is a 3.5-inch drive and it looks like they do. There isn’t a whole lot open to interpretation in that regards. So there’s only one thing left to say, well done WD. The Gold is a kickass drive!

Pros

• High workload rating
• Impressive Performance
• Great Feature set
• Wide capacity range from 1TB to 12TB

Cons

• None

“WD shows how an enterprise drive should be with the Gold series. A great performance, solid features, and a high workload rating make it a great enterprise-grade drive.”

Thank you, Western Digital, for providing us with this sample