Tuesday, September 12, 2017

Western Digital Rolls Out 12TB Enterprise Hard Drives

Irvine-based storage products maker Western Digital said today that it has expanded its line of WD Gold hard drives, to include a new, 12TB hard drive, specifically for Big Data applications, enterprise, and cloud applications. According to WD, the new hard drives have a 2.5 million hour MTBF (mean time between failures), which it says is among the highest in its hard drive portfolio. Pricing on the new drives was not announced. Disk drive manufacturers have traditionally offered up different tiers of reliability in their storage, with more demanding OEM and enterprise customers typically receiving drives with a higher MTBF, versus low end consumer offerings, which typically have 1.2 million hour MTBF and often time lower ratings. Western Digital itself has stopped providing MTBF numbers for its non-enterprise, consumer drives.