Enterprise

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

Discuss on Reddit

Adam Armstrong

Adam is the chief news editor for StorageReview.com, managing our internal and freelance content teams.

Recent Posts

Microsoft Maia 300 Puts 288GB of HBM4 at 18TB/s on an N2P Chiplet and 96 Accelerators in a 167kW Rack

Microsoft unveiled Azure Maia 300 today at the OCP Global Summit, the third generation of its in-house inference accelerator and…

7 hours ago

Intel GPU D-Series Packs 480GB LPDDR5X and 1.3 PFLOPS FP8 into a 350W PCIe Card

Intel today gave Crescent Island its product name at the OCP Global Summit. The Intel GPU D-series is built on…

8 hours ago

Micas Networks Puts Broadcom Tomahawk 6 in Three 102.4T Switches, Including a 1RU Davisson CPO Box

Micas Networks announced three 102.4Tb/s Ethernet switches today, all built on Broadcom Tomahawk 6 and all running SONiC: a 4RU…

8 hours ago

Airrived Agentic OS Named a Gartner Cool Vendor in Agentic AI Security, With Air-Gapped Deployment

Airrived has been named a Cool Vendor in Gartner's Coolest Vendor Innovations in Agentic AI Security report, published October 2.…

9 hours ago

NVIDIA and Cisco USFP Optics Target 400Gb/s per Lane, With MGX 1.2 and DSX OS Updates at OCP 2026

NVIDIA and Cisco announced plans today for Ultra-Dense Small Form Factor Pluggable (USFP), an optical module format built for 400Gb/s-per-lane…

11 hours ago

AMD Helion Agentic AI Rack Packs Up to 32,768 EPYC Cores in an Open OCP Blueprint

AMD introduced Helion today, an open rack reference design for agentic AI that builds on its Helios rack-scale platform. Helion…

12 hours ago