Western Digital launches 10TB 'WD Gold' datacenter hard drive

Even though solid state drives are all the rage nowadays from a performance standpoint, mechanical hard drives still reign supreme for capacity. While SSDs should eventually catch up to HDDs in this regard, that is not going to happen any time soon. Even when SSDs do reach capacity parity, their prices will not. In other words, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for an affordable 10TB solid state drive.

Speaking of 10TB hard disk drives, today, Western Digital announces a datacenter HDD with that capacity. This is the company's highest-capacity 'WD Gold' drive ever.

"WD Gold 10TB datacenter hard drives feature an optimized design over the existing WD Gold 8TB drives that helps reduce TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of servers and storage systems through an 8 percent operating power reduction while delivering 25 percent more capacity. This benefits IT administrators challenged with keeping up with growing storage demands on limited budgets", says Western Digital.

Brendan Collins, VP of product marketing, Western Digital explains, "it is Western Digital's ongoing goal to provide superior reliability and compelling value to our enterprise customers. WD Gold drives are a key component of the overall WD portfolio, providing power efficient, capacity-optimized storage for a wide range of high workload applications. The new 10TB capacity enables customers to efficiently deploy higher density storage solutions".

Compared to the existing 8TB drive, the 10TB variant has a couple of significant improvements (besides two additional terabytes). For a datacenter, energy savings can be very important -- it is 26 percent more power efficient. From a performance perspective, it is 21 percent faster. Both of these enhancements should prove very attractive to IT decision-makers in the enterprise.

If you are a decision-maker and you want to purchase this 10TB drive (WD101KRYZ) for your datacenter, you can buy it immediately from the usual channels -- including from Western Digital directly. Pricing is not yet known, but it will likely vary based on the number of units you order. With that said, the 8TB variant is currently $595.99, so it will definitely be more than that.