Western Digital is one of the most well-known companies for storage solutions. With the latest NAS products we searched for a new HDD that would need our needs and for that purpose we chosen the WD Gold 8T HDD NAS product. Today we will examine its performance specifications and if it’s a good or not product for you to buy.

Starting with the specs, Western Digital has many different product lines for its NAS servers. There is the purple, red, red plus, red pro, gold and Ultra star series. For the 8TB area we gathered and compared all the WD available series.

According to the specs, the GOLD series performs the best and has the same price as the Red Pro series (prices from WD website). The Purple series are also interesting since they use CMR technology but have only 3 years of warranty. The GOLD series also seems to have the highest Workload rate with 550TB/year.

Conquer tough workloads with enterprise-class WD Gold™ HDDs. Available in 1TB to 18TB capacities, this highly reliable solution for demanding storage environments provides up to 2.5M hours MTBF, vibration protection technology and a low power draw thanks to HelioSeal™ technology [for 12TB and above]. Specifically designed for use in enterprise-class data centers and storage systems, the WD Gold SATA HDD delivers the world-class performance you expect from Western Digital hard drives.

Beyond Expectations
WD Gold™ hard drives are performance-optimized for heavy application workloads, whether you need 1TB or 18TB. The WD Gold HDD’s wide capacity range solves for the most demanding storage environments.

Enhanced Reliability
With up to 2.5M hours MTBF, WD Gold™ hard drives deliver enhanced levels of dependability and durability.

A World-Class Performer
Delivering excellent service to any storage environment, WD Gold™ hard drives are designed to handle workloads up to 550TB per year – among the highest of any 3.5-inch hard drive. (Workload Rate is defined as the amount of user data transferred to or from the hard drive. Workload Rate is annualized (TB transferred X (8760 / recorded power-on hours)). Workload Rate will vary depending on your hardware and software components and configurations.)

Vibration Protection
WD Gold™ has sophisticated monitoring electronics that help correct linear and rotational vibrations in real time using enhanced vibration protection technology for improved performance in high-vibration environments.

Play Well with Others
Broadly compatible with most PC and major enterprise operating systems. Specifically designed for use in enterprise-grade data centers and storage systems.

Leading the Way
Energy Assisted Magnetic Recording (EAMR) technology enables higher media precision and increases areal density. The Triple State Actuator (TSA) enhances the accuracy of head-positioning and delivers better performance and data integrity to also increase areal density. Both technologies are available only in 16TB capacities and above.

5-Year Limited Warranty
Every WD Gold™ HDD comes with a 5-year limited warranty, so you can be confident in your storage.

- Retail package

The GOLD series come in an antistatic bag with a label containing all the needed info.

Inside you will find the HDD itself.

After connecting the HDD to the system, we formatted the disk and we users can expect 7.27TB usuable free space.

The ClystalDiskInfo software gives us more information