WD releases 12TB Gold HDD for 689 euros

Western Digital has added a 12TB HDD to its WD Gold series for enterprise applications. The helium-filled sata-hdd is equipped with 256MB cache memory and has a speed of 7200rpm.

WD already offered HDDs with capacities up to 10TB in its Gold series, a 12TB variant has now been added. The hdd is listed for a price of 689 euros on the manufacturer’s website. The 3.5″ HDDs in the Gold series are intended for continuous use and have an MTBF of 2.5 million hours. The WD Red HDDs intended for NAS devices, for example, have 1 million hours.

The manufacturer provides a five-year warranty on the WD Gold HDDs. Like other high-capacity hard drives, it uses helium. Because helium has a lower density than air, the platters and heads suffer less from friction, resulting in less heat generation. This allows the use of more platters.

At the end of last year, WD already announced a 12TB HDD for the business market under the HGST brand name. Seagate has already released 12TB HDDs. At the moment there are no HDDs with a storage capacity larger than 12TB, but Toshiba, WD and Seagate have indicated that they will come with 14TB or 16TB HDDs.