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Western Digital (WD) Gold 12TB Hard Drive Review

To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO.

100GB file.
60GB iso image.
60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files.
50GB File folder – 28,523 files.
12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files).
10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images).
10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files).
5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo.

Our real life file transfer tests proved no obstacle to the WD Gold, the drive averaging 245.58MB/s for writes and 237.01MB/s for reads for the nine tests.

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10 comments

  1. 550MB a year work load.! i hope they mean TB

  2. 256GB cache ?

  3. MB*

  4. What about noise levels and temperatures? For home NAS usage, those are very relevant parameters when choosing HDDs.

  5. It is never mentioned. Many people want to know, but every time they seem to “forget” that, or answer any questions about it. Definitely much more important than 240 or 260MBs throughput..

  6. “WD claim a 550MB a year work load.” This doesn’t look right

  7. I know – if 550MB per year, it would take you the entire lifetime to fill up the drive 😉

    It IS 550TB

    Real specs:

    Designed with a workload rating up to 550TB per year

    Up to 2.5M hours MTBF with a 5 year limited warranty

    4th generation HelioSeal technology (12TB)

    RAFF technology for vibration protection

    RAID-specific time-limited error recovery (TLER)

    Was going to buy seagate, but found these beauties at a great price so going in for 4 initially 🙂

  8. Same spam bots on all the tech sites. I doubt “Cheryl” could earn that much in one month unless it was through illicit means.

  9. 550TB per year doesn’t sound much. That’s like 45TB per month, 11TB per week, 1,63 TB per day. How is this a high workload?

  10. Compared to ssd drives it is a lot. Compared to seagate enterprise drives they are about the same. Barracudas are at 300TB year. I have done more than the specced workloads without any issues. Typical use even in enterprise is not that high unless you are writing TB data daily such as telecommunications companies do. This only recently appeared as part of hard drive specs. You can clearly exceed the workload but if the drive dies prematurely I bet they try to get out of warranty replacement. But having worked telecom, we constantly replaced hard drives due to heavy workloads back in the early 2000s.