Western Digital Ships 12 TB WD Gold HDD

Megalith

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In before “that’s a lot of data to store on one drive”: Western Digital has begun to ship its 3.5” WD Gold HDD with 12 TB capacity, which relies on the same platform as the HGST Ultrastar He12 launched this year. According to AnandTech, the main difference between the WD Gold and the HGST Ultrastar He12 is the enterprise options for the latter: there are models with the SAS 12 Gb/s interface and there are models with SED support and Instant Secure Erase feature.

Where the HGST-branded drives are made available primarily through B2B channels, the WD Gold are sold both through B2B and B2C channels and thus can be purchased by wider audiences. For example, boutique PC makers, as well as DIY enthusiasts, may start using the WD Gold 12 TB for their high-end builds, something they could not do with the HGST drives. These HDDs may be considered as an overkill for desktops, but since WD’s desktop offerings top at 6 TB, the WD Gold (and the perhaps inevitable future WD Red Pro 12 TB) is the WD’s closest rival for Seagate’s BarraCuda Pro drives.
 
$521.99 :eek:

Too rich for my blood.


Maybe it will put some downward pressure on the pricing of the 10GB units though.

I have 12x 4GB Red's and I could use to replace them all with something larger...
 
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HDD prices are taking too long to go down in price. That price sounds more reasonable for a 16tb hdd whenever that comes out.
 
$500 for a top of line cutting edge storage device is lower then it would have been say 20 years ago (late 90's), where you would easily be spending a grand for a SCSI spinner.
 
Was just thinking about this:

oldpc-1.jpg


and did some quick mental calculations (no, not really) and figured that if a 12TB drive existed in those days at that kind of price point - 10MB for $3998 - the 12TB drive would clock in at a whopping $4,797,600,000 give or take a few million either way. :D
 
HDD prices are taking too long to go down in price. That price sounds more reasonable for a 16tb hdd whenever that comes out.


honestly the price doesn't seem bad at all.. where the problem is at is the 1-2TB area where prices have pretty much stalled around the 100-200 price range and then 4-12 is smashed together between 200-500 dollars and most of it sitting around the 300 dollar range.. i think the problem revolves more around the fact that SSD prices above 250GB are ridiculously high which has allowed mechanical drives 1TB or higher to stay where they've been at for the last 10 years.
 
honestly the price doesn't seem bad at all.. where the problem is at is the 1-2TB area where prices have pretty much stalled around the 100-200 price range and then 4-12 is smashed together between 200-500 dollars and most of it sitting around the 300 dollar range.. i think the problem revolves more around the fact that SSD prices above 250GB are ridiculously high which has allowed mechanical drives 1TB or higher to stay where they've been at for the last 10 years.

The 4TB server drives seem to be the best price point right now, as they are not much more expensive than the 2TB drives.
I don't bother buying anything less than 4TB for the office servers any more.
I'd rather use 4TB drives in raid 10 than 2TB drives in raid 6.
 
Was just thinking about this:

and did some quick mental calculations (no, not really) and figured that if a 12TB drive existed in those days at that kind of price point - 10MB for $3998 - the 12TB drive would clock in at a whopping $4,797,600,000 give or take a few million either way. :D


$10,733,223,936 in today's money, accounting for inflation. Just want to make sure you have the most accurate numbers when you plan out your gazillion dollar data center.
 
HDD prices are taking too long to go down in price. That price sounds more reasonable for a 16tb hdd whenever that comes out.
Wait for them to trickle down into external HDDs.
That's what happened for the Ultrastar He8, and it's beginning to happen for the He10 (20TB Duo external released a few weeks ago, 10TB externals presumably to follow soon).
 
Just want to make sure you have the most accurate numbers when you plan out your gazillion dollar data center.

You mean "The Ultimate Man Cave" aka the NSA's new data storage facility in Utah where basically everything is stored.

And yes, I was very careful with using the word "everything" in that last sentence, and rightly so. :D

As for the ~$11 billion, when compared to the cost of that data center, ~$11 billion is like the price of lunch at Hooters for you and a few dozen friends. :p
 
The 4TB server drives seem to be the best price point right now, as they are not much more expensive than the 2TB drives.
I don't bother buying anything less than 4TB for the office servers any more.
I'd rather use 4TB drives in raid 10 than 2TB drives in raid 6.

yeah completely agree.. been looking at replacing all my storage drives with 4TB drives but keep hoping the bestbuy here might actually order some of those 8TB WD external drives so i can pick a few of those up instead.
 
yeah completely agree.. been looking at replacing all my storage drives with 4TB drives but keep hoping the bestbuy here might actually order some of those 8TB WD external drives so i can pick a few of those up instead.
I haven't bought any recently (~6 months). Are those still the same white-label 5400rpm Ultrastar He8 / red-label 5400rpm Reds?
Have quite a few of those outside of my core fileservers (real Ultrastar He8s), but those have been rock solid for me with no DOAs.
 
I haven't bought any recently (~6 months). Are those still the same white-label 5400rpm Ultrastar He8 / red-label 5400rpm Reds?
Have quite a few of those outside of my core fileservers (real Ultrastar He8s), but those have been rock solid for me with no DOAs.

as far as i know yes most people still picking them up have gotten the 256mb cache versions though instead of the 128mb cache versions that were an option early on.
 
Was just thinking about this:

oldpc-1.jpg


and did some quick mental calculations (no, not really) and figured that if a 12TB drive existed in those days at that kind of price point - 10MB for $3998 - the 12TB drive would clock in at a whopping $4,797,600,000 give or take a few million either way. :D

Let's be serious though. 12TB at the time would have easily been worth $5m to the data centers that would actually desire for that kind of capacity!
 
I don't like the idea of putting so many eggs in one basket.

Redundancy locally + remote backup.

Gold drives are enterprise drives intended to go into raid systems in an enterprise setting where everything is always remotely backed up.

These are not intended to be single consumer drives, and you probably wouldn't want to use them as such due to TLER which while awesome for RAID, means a line drive is less likely to be able to recover from a failure
 
Huh. $500 for 12TB isn't bad at all, I paid around $200 for my 6TB's and that was shucking them. Bare drives were closer to $300.

I wonder what the max size my Perc H700 will support... time to google-fu. Although at this rate it will take me 2 or 3 years of abuse to fill up that 4 x 6gb raid 5 drive, still have like 10TB free and I have done zero cleanup in a year. I'm sure I could delete a couple TB easy, stupid BR rips are huge.

edit - looking like 6TB might be the max for me. Bummer. But I could use a 12TB external USB drive for backups, that would be handy :)
 
Maybe it will put some downward pressure on the pricing of the 10GB units though.

People say that every time a new bigger drive comes out, but why would it? There's no precedent for it. Demand for the lower sizes doesn't decrease in response to a larger size being available.

Pricing charts for every size 10TB down to 1TB are pretty steady year after year.
 
Just forget about hardware RAID and go ZFS instead :D

Well I have the raid controller already. And I'm running windows, so that kind of counts ZFS out. But yes, if I was building a standalone NAS or FreeNAS or something, yes I would do ZFS.

And raid 5 isn't bad as long as you backup every now and then.
 
People say that every time a new bigger drive comes out, but why would it? There's no precedent for it. Demand for the lower sizes doesn't decrease in response to a larger size being available.

Pricing charts for every size 10TB down to 1TB are pretty steady year after year.

Can you blame me for having hope? :p
 
Was just thinking about this:

and did some quick mental calculations (no, not really) and figured that if a 12TB drive existed in those days at that kind of price point - 10MB for $3998 - the 12TB drive would clock in at a whopping $4,797,600,000 give or take a few million either way. :D

I'm too lazy to do the math, but I believe that 10MB drive is actually 10MB to the power of 2, so 10,485,760 bytes.

I don't recall when the Base 10 stuff started, but I think anything below 1 GB is probably base 2. So a 12TB is not even close to 12TB. Either way I'd guess that this drive is right around 1,000,000 times the capacity. Which is crazy to think that in 35 years time that kind of advancement has taken place.
 
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