Western Digital brings back the Gold

Storage specialist Western Digital has announced it is extending its colour-coded product range still further with the reintroduction of WD Gold as an enterprise-class option in 1TB to 14TB capacities.

Western Digital has long used colour-coding to differentiate its products for each target market. While not all of its parts use the branding - its most recently-announced 18TB and 20TB drives are simply sold under the Ultrastar DC moniker - the company offers performance Black, energy-efficient Green, mainstream Blue, network attached storage (NAS) focused Red, error-tolerant Purple for surveillance devices, and for a while an enterprise-focused family dubbed Gold.

The company's current product portfolio, however, dropped the Gold range in favour of having enterprise users pick up the Ultrastar DC parts. While there's no sign of the Ultrastar family undergoing rebranding, Western Digital has confirmed that it is bringing back the Gold product range - with, as before, a focus on the data centre user.

'The WD Gold HDD returns in the form of a family of enterprise-class SATA hard drives that enables customers, including ones with single-unit or small order requirements, to deploy enterprise-class drives for their demanding workloads. This family of hard drives (WD Gold DC HA750) is derived from our flagship Ultrastar SATA series, using the most popular features that cater to leading-edge cloud applications and distributed file systems, as well as to object storage solutions,' explains WD's Suvodeep Gupta of the launch. 'Offered in a full range of capacities from 1TB to 14TB, the WD Gold drives can be deployed across traditional storage arrays, rack-mounted storage enclosures, and server-based distributed storage systems. The HelioSeal technology in the 12TB and 14TB drives offer superior storage densities and extreme power efficiency.'

The drives are to launch in 1TB to 14TB variants, exclusively in the 3.5" SATA form factor, by the end of the month. More information is available on the official product page.