WD Increases Gold HDD Capacities

While SSDs continue to grow in both speed and capacity, hard disk drive makers aren’t sitting still either. In an effort to maintain their hold on the storage business, they’ve both increased capacity and improved their speeds. To this end, Western Digital has released an updated to their Gold series of enterprise HDDs to increase their capacity. The new drive, WD101KRYZ, brings a total of 10TBs, 25% more than the current 8TB model.

• Improved power efficiency – HelioSeal Technology delivers lower power with an increase in capacity. Power efficiency (watts/TB) during operation is improved up to 26 percent over the WD Gold 8 TB drive.
• Better performance – Up to 21 percent sequential performance improvement over WD Gold 8 TB datacenter drives
• High reliability – WD Gold drives incorporate best-of-breed design, manufacturing and test processes to achieve one of the highest reliability ratings in the industry – 2.5 million hours MTBF (8 TB and 10 TB offerings)
• Dedicated Premium Support Line – Western Digital offers a 24/7 premium support line for WD Gold drive customers and can be reached at U.S.: (855) 559-3733; International: +80055593733.

The Gold lineup is meant for datatcenter use, making density and power consumption priorities. The new HelioSeal design helps reduce 8% power consumption per TB while increasing capacities to 10TB. Given that both models use a helium fill, the increase has to come from either denser platters or more platters, with the power consumption figures pointing to the former. Once HAMR gets going, I wonder how large HDDs are going to get if you combine that with the helium filling.