Despite what’s going on with Western Digital in the consumer HDD space, it continues to expand its offerings for businesses and data centers. Clients with large storage demands can now look forward to Western Digitals 16TB and 18TB models in its Gold lineup of SATA drives.
The 3.5-inch 7400 RPM Gold series use “conventional magnetic recording” (CMR) technology, and are built to withstand yearly operation (24x7x365) within the most demanding storage environments. Western Digital also highlights enhanced reliability by specifying up to 2.5M hours of MTBF for these drives.
Both new capacity models are currently available with UK-based retailer, SPAN, and are yet to be listed on WD’s official website. The 16TB version sells for £464 (~$580), while the 18TB costs £520 (~$650). Both models are expected to cost less when they become available in the US.
Western Digital’s Gold series scales up drive cache and data transfer rate with capacity. For reference, the 14TB model features a 512MB cache and is rated for 267MB/s of max sustained transfers. Although expectations won’t be jumping significantly with the new 16TB and 18TB models, a slight increase in cache size and transfer rates is expected.
