WD Gold drives

[Arwen]

Seems marketing has gotten gold on thier mind. Westerm Digital has released
Gold SATA drives in 4, 6 and 8 Terrabyte sizes. Read somewhere they plan to
replace the WD Re Enterprise drive line with the WD Gold line. They are even
supposed to have helium, but the WD site does not mention it.

 

[mattbbpl]

It looks like they start @ $260 for the 4TB model.

 

[jgreco]

Hard drive manufacturers seeing writing on the wall.

Small drives destined for oblivion. Fast drives destined for oblivion. HDD only good for large capacity storage, and even that is "... for now."

 

[mattbbpl]

I want Optane to pan out so very badly....

 

[jgreco]

Someone reads my links. Makes me happy.

 

[Ericloewe]

Meh, I've been hearing that memristors/resistor-based memory/phase change memory/whatever is a year away for over a decade now. I'll believe when I see it.

 

[gpsguy]

You can always dream about the big 13TB Fixstars - http://www.fixstars.com/en/ssd/

 

[jgreco]

You can always dream about the big 13TB Fixstars - http://www.fixstars.com/en/ssd/

Why dream. Mushkin's already working on a 4TB unit for $500.

 

[anodos]

I want Optane to pan out so very badly....

I thought intel just fired a tons of engineeers so that they could focus on mobile and the cloud. :D

Okay. I admit that's just random trolling.

 

[Ericloewe]

I thought intel just fired a tons of engineeers so that they could focus on mobile and the cloud. :D

Okay. I admit that's just random trolling.

"We need to innovate in new market segments."
"How do we do that?"
"We could fire one tenth of our workforce..."

 

[joeschmuck]

With respect to the WD Gold line and using them in a FreeNAS environment, I personally think it will come down to Cost vs. Warranty to the Red drive lineup, additionally if they need the 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm drives.

 

[jgreco]

"We need to innovate in new market segments."
"How do we do that?"
"We could fire one tenth of our workforce..."

Intel is on the long road to being a has-been company, I fear. After their stunning suckery in the mid-2000's, and then coming back and reconquering the CPU crown, they were faced with new threats from alternative CPU's, and didn't bother to mount a strong defense for the longest time. Things like excellence in network controllers, slipped. They're doing okay in the flash market but Samsung's really very strong there, probably outdoing them. Where's the future for them?

The cloud is going to wake up one day and discover that we've finally arrived at a non-Windows-centric world where a lot of truly useful software can compile and run on alternative architectures. And that we've been doing so for long enough that core speeds aren't as important as core counts, etc. Intel can hold onto that if they can produce low watt, high core count stuff like the new Intel Xeon D stuff ... maybe. But the stagnation of the last half a decade is pretty depressing.

 

[ALFA]

We got the complete spectrum of the rainbow, great WD

Now regarding to those HDD, they are labeled for "datacenter" work, may I ask, there is any suitable difference using this and not the RED "optimized" NAS drives or its just for the omps?

 

[jgreco]

We got the complete spectrum of the rainbow, great WD

Now regarding to those HDD, they are labeled for "datacenter" work, may I ask, there is any suitable difference using this and not the RED "optimized" NAS drives or its just for the omps?

Well. Here's what's going on. There's a major shift going on in the storage industry. SAS, "enterprise grade" drives, multipath, extremely expensive hardware, all of that is slowly being discovered for what some of us always knew it to be.... extremely expensive bullchips. Two cheap somethings and some software or configuration to make it redundant often works out better than one super-expensive high-availability redundant-this-and-that. Software based storage has been eating the large SAN arrays, and the software based storage can usually deal with cheap disk even better than the hardware controllers could cope with high quality disk. Look at ZFS as an example. You *CAN* build your ZFS filer out of high quality SAS with redundant pathings, but the value added over just getting inexpensive SATA drives is not that great.

HDD storage in the data center is rapidly heading for archival use. They've got to figure out how to create the data center equivalent of what a home user's WD Green drive. The WD Red is already optimized to the general task, except that it is missing some of the vibration resistance that would be a nice-to-have in a data center drive. Problem is, it looks like they haven't really figured out that what they really need is to mark down the prices on the drives. More likely, they actually know that some of us don't care about warranties and are very happy to get ahold of a desktop drive for ~$275-$300, or shuck a WD enterprise 8TB for ~$250, or just use the $200 8TB SMR drives for archival quality storage and use SSD for everything else.

Part of the problem was that their rainbow color lineup didn't really have anything optimized to be suitable for software defined storage on a large scale, so what a lot of us have been saying is to just go for the inexpensive WD Red and then just don't worry about the vibrations, which is not a horrible issue anyways. Unless the WD Golds are made out of gold, as a designer I'm not seeing a ton of value. I think at the suggested price points that WD Gold is more of an attempt by WD to make more gold for itself, but I don't know how well that'll work out for them.

 

[Arwen]

Some features touted for the Gold:

• Larger cache
• Better cache management
• Dual stage arm, (gross and fine positioning?)
• More vibration tolerance

As for the NAS quality drives, I'd guess this;

• Good enough - Red
• Better - Red Pro
• Best - Gold / Re

jgreco,
As for you comment about the Red's vibration resistance,
it appears that's in the Red Pro. (And the Gold / Re line...)

 

[Arwen]

As for the lame sized 4TB SSD, and the un-known brand 13TB SSD, how about a Samsung 15TB SSD?

https://news.samsung.com/global/sam...ty-15-36tb-ssd-for-enterprise-storage-systems
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/samsungs-monstrous-15tb-ssd-is-now-shipping/