Western Digital Announces WD Gold NVMe SSDs

Today Western Digital announced new NVMe SSDs in their WD Gold family. The new SSDs are aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to help them transition to NVMe storage and all the benefits that come with it such as much higher performance and ultra-low latency. This marks the first NVMe product in the WD Gold family and broadens the company’s overall data center offerings.

NVMe SSDs have really taken off has their price as come down. They offer up to five times the sequential performance of SATA SSDs and can help leverage the advancements in multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs. According to IDC, NVMe unit shipments are expected to exceed 79% by 2023. The introduction of the WD Gold NVMe SSDs, Western Digital is giving customers more options in storage going forward.

The new drives come in four capacities: 960GB, 1.92TB, 3.84TB, and 7.68TB. The SSDs are based on Western Digital’s silicon-to-system expertise, from its 3D TLC NAND SSD media to its purpose-built firmware and own integrated controller. The WD Gold NVMe SSDs are designed for the primary storage in servers delivering superior response times, higher throughput and greater scale than existing SATA devices for enterprise applications. The drives come with a five-year limited warranty and secure boot and secure erase.

WD Gold NVMe SSDs Key Specifications

Interface	U.2 7mm PCIe Gen3.1 x4
Formatted Capacity	960GB	1.92TB	3.84TB	7.69TB
Performance
Read Throughput (max MiB/s, Seq 128KiB)	3K	3.1K
Write Throughput (max MiB/s, Seq 128KiB)	1.1K	2K	1.8K
Read IOPS (max, Rnd 4KiB)	413K	472K	469K	467K
Write IOPS (max, Rnd 4KiB)	44K	63K		65K
Mixed IOPS (max, 70/30 R/W, 4KiB)	111K	194K	174K	187K
Latency (μs, 4KiB Random Read QD1, 99%)	210	208	221	225
Maximum Petabytes Written	1.4	2.8	5.61	11.21
Endurance (DW/D)	0.8
Power
Requirement (DC, +/- 10%)	+12V
Operating Modes (W, Average)	10, 11, 12
Idle (W, Average)	4.6	4.62	4.94	4.95
Reliability
MTBF	2
Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate (UBER)	1 in 10^17
Limited Warranty	5-year
Physical Size
z-height (mm)	7.00 +0.2/-0.5 (including labels)
Dimensions (width x length, mm) Weight (g. max)	69.85 (+/- 0.25) x 100.45 95
Environmental
Operating Temperature	0°C to 70°C
Non-operating Temperature	-40°C to 85°C

 

Availability

The new WD Gold NVMe SSDs are expected to ship in the second calendar quarter of 2020. The drives start as low at $242 for the 960GB.

WD Gold NVMe SSDs

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