Western Digital WD Gold 24TB HDD Review - High-Capacity Masterpiece

TweakTown Rating: 98%

Our Verdict

Western Digital's WD Gold 24TB hard drive is quite simply CMR at its best!

Pros

• Capacity
• Throughput performance
• Random performance
• Endurance

Cons

• None

Should you buy it?

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Buy at Amazon for $1199.99 USD

Up 47.6% vs 30 days ago

Also at Newegg

Buy at Amazon for $1298.15 CAD

Also at Newegg $1329.99 CAD

Buy at Amazon for £1185.89

View price at Amazon

Also at PC Case Gear

Introduction & Drive Details

As we see it, Conventional Magnetic Recording, or CMR, is the way to go for consistency, reliability and performance as opposed to competing recording technologies like SMR or Shingled Magnetic Recording. In our opinion, CMR, although it is more capacity-limited compared with emerging technologies such as HAMR (Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording) or current overlapping recording technologies (SMR), the superior performance realized through CMR more than offsets the higher or potentially higher capacity of those alternative technologies.

Western Digital's WD Gold 24TB is its newest, highest-capacity, enterprise-class HDD. At a whopping 24TB, it's the highest capacity and most advanced CMR HDD we've encountered to date. Some of what makes this HDD stand out from its competition include the following: With a maximum data transfer rate of up to 298MB/s, it provides strong performance In RAID environments. The WD Gold 24TB drive also delivers high system performance in storage platforms that require strong random read/write capability. Its high capacity and improved power efficiency while idle help reduce energy consumption and heat, especially on a watt/capacity basis.

Additional and unique attributes of the WD Gold 24TB include sophisticated vibration monitoring and correction capabilities. Armor Cache technology provides enterprise power loss protection of data in write-cache enabled (WCE) mode while increasing performance in write-cache disabled (WCD) mode.

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The WD Gold 24TB is warranted for a massive 550 TBW per year for 5 years.

Drive Details

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Best Deals: Western Digital WD Gold 24TB HDD

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The unique feature set that OptiNAND technology brings to the table really sets the WD Gold 24TB apart from competing high-capacity offerings.

Synthetic Benchmarks: CDM, ATTO & Blackmagic

CrystalDiskMark

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Especially impressive here is the drive's 1.42 MB/s random read performance, which is about 50% higher than we've extracted from any 7,200 RPM HDD previously.

ATTO

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Exceptional small file performance here really stands out, along with its overall throughput capabilities.

Blackmagic

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The 24TB WD Gold shows itself capable of handling MP4 recording/playback at up to 8K 60 frames. Impressive.

Transfer Rates, Iometer, and HDTune

DiskBench - Transfer Rates

A transfer rate of 127 MB/s to and from itself is impressive for a mechanical HDD, as is its read transfer rate of 206 MB/s to the host.

Iometer - Random and Sequential

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These Iometer-based benchmarks were provided by Western Digital, and we have included them as we find them to be quite informative.

HDTune - Transfer rates at disk position

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These HDTune-based benchmarks were provided by Western Digital, and we have included them as we find them to be quite informative.

Final Thoughts

As stated previously, we are of the opinion that Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) still affords the best overall proposition when it comes to mechanical based storage and Western Digital's WD Gold 24TB is the best of the best of its kind available today. It is loaded with unique features that enhance data protection, availability, and reliability beyond any of its kind we've encountered to date.

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It's the biggest and best of its kind and as such is well deserving of our highest award. Editor's choice.