Western Digital Gold Enterprise 18 TB test: Large capacity at a tight price

Hard drive capacities have been slowly increasing lately, and high-end models often ship long after they’ve been announced. The first drives with a capacity of 26 TB with OptiNAND technology (without SMR) are thus marketed in dribs and drabs at Western Digital, but we tested here the Gold 18 TB WD181KRYZ CMR type model with helium sealing ( 3.5 inch / SATA 6 interface / 512MB DRAM cache / 7200 rpm). While the 18 TB Gold and the 18 TB UltraStar DC HC550 share the same base, the latter is available with SATA and SAS interfaces and is intended for high-density storage arrays. The storage capacity of this Gold is based on nine (9) 2 TB platters with mechanics exploiting several technologies such as EAMR, Energy Assisted Magnetic Recording), which means that the recording heads exploit an even higher recording density. on the trays. It reaches 1022 GB / in² for this 18 TB model, against 918 GB / in² for the 16 TB.

Like other models in the Gold line over 12TB, this 18TB is helium-filled to eliminate the turbulence and jolts that can affect components as thin and light as those contained in a hard drive. (read/write heads and platters). To increase the storage capacity, WD plays on the thinning of the trays, which go from 7 to 9, and the increase in the density of the latter. And thanks to helium, which reduces turbulence, the read/write head arm positions itself more precisely and the platters vibrate less at high speeds. They can also be stacked closer to each other. The WD Gold also offers Rotational Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF), which changes the positioning of the read/write heads to compensate for any rotational vibration caused by the hard drive itself or nearby drives in a cabinet. .

Interesting performances

In terms of performance, with CrystalDisk Mark 8.14, the Gold 18 TB provides a throughput of 248 MB/s in writing and up to 252 MB/s in reading (with a PC equipped with an Intel Core i7-10850H processor with 64 GB of RAM and two 2TB Sabrent Rocket SSDs). Very satisfactory performance at a contained price: Western Digital has in fact lowered the price of this Gold 18 TB to €429 excluding tax (€23 per TB), and the 16 TB model is even more interesting at the moment at €257 excluding tax ( €16 per TB) to equip a NAS. A final word on warranty and reliability. All WD Gold drives are backed by a five-year warranty and are rated for 600,000 head load/unload cycles. The MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) is 2.5 million hours. The average failure rate (AFR%) is less than 0.5% for all models based on 219TB per year, although these hard drives are actually rated for 550TB per year. While most PC users have switched to SSDs for their storage needs due to their increased speeds, HDDs are still frequently used to store large amounts of data on NAS and SANs. However, SSDs are still gaining ground with the adoption of QLC NAND flash, which is more capacitive and less expensive to purchase.