WD rust-proofs spinners with Gold offering

WD has set up a new data centre nearline disk drive brand, Gold, with three drive capacities matching and topping the Re brand’s capacities. The spinning rust folk have released 4, 6 and 8TB, 3.5-inch Gold drives with a mix of technologies. The 8TB Gold drive is a helium-filled drive for example, while other two are air- …

[Lusty]

When did spinning drives get a write limit? I've not been paying attention for a while to these but surely magnetic tech shouldn't worry about these things. Admittedly 8TB drives are probably aimed at offline storage with erasure coding instead of RAID so probably write lifecycles wouldn't be an issue but what if that implies a read lifecycle as well? Data integrity operations might kill the drive in that scenario which would be an issue.

[Captain Scarlet]

Pretty sure its just to cover its warranty period, if you write more than that data and the drive fails they can turn around and say the drive was abused.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

It may simply be a duty cycle thing: it does equate to writing over a gigabyte a minute continuously. I'd regard that as pushing a drive quite hard for five years solid.

[chrismevans]

I agree, when did this happen? I see this being quoted more often and the numbers aren't as great as some flash devices. 550TB/year is only about 0.2 DWPD for the 8TB model. I wonder if the write limit came in with helium filled drives as a way to fix the warranty as those drives eventually leak out their helium and seize up.

[Dagg]

Still will NOT use WD

Been badly burnt, had a black die under warranty, got a replacement then it failed under warranty. I'm now majorly gun shy of anything WD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Still will NOT use WD

Why the down mark, all he said was that he personally had reservations due to his experience of WD reliability.

Not every purchaser is buying hundreds of units at a time but 2 consecutive personal fails for a home user does give him a right to an opinion.