Western Digital Takes Datacenter Honors With WD Gold HelioSeal Hard Drives

The WD Gold drives come packing Western Digital’s HelioSeal technology, which infuses the drives with helium to make them quieter, more efficient and emboldened with more densely packed platters. HelioSeal is said to improve power efficiency by up to 15 percent, while at the same time reducing power consumption by 26 percent.

Compared to the previous generation Re 4TB datacenter drives, sequential performance has increased by 18 percent. Random write performance has improved by 30 percent compared to the previous generation Re 6TB datacenter drive. Western Digital is also touting a high level of reliability with a MTBF of 2.5 million hours. And if that wasn’t enough, Western Digital is offering a dedicated 24/7 premium phone support line for its new WD Gold datacenter drives for all of its 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 Western Digital Marketing VP Brendan Collins, 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.”

The WD Gold drives will be available in three capacities: 4TB (WD4002FRYZ), 6TB (WD6002FRYZ) and 8TB (WD8002FYYZ). Western Digital says that all flavors of the WD Gold drives are available for purchase, but the only one we could find online at press time was the 4TB model, which is going for $289 on Amazon.