Western Digital RE4 2TB HDD review

The RE4 is a 4 platter based 7200 RPM, SATA 3Gbps HDD

specially designed and targeted for enterprise storage. The disk provides 2 TB

storage space in the 3.5'' form factor which is a fairly recent upgrade for

Western Digital. The drive sports a 64 MB cache and is touted to have a 1.2

Billion hours MTBF ( mean time between failure), which is impressive.This drive

is designed in a way that it can withstand  some levels of rough handling during

hot swapping of blades and media in data centers. The drive features advanced

acoustics which enable lesser noise during operation and produces lesser

vibration upon touch, so much so that the drive feels almost dead even when

working at full tilt.

When tested at our labs using the HDTune benchmark, the

disk fared rather well. The HDD was able to garner an average transfer speed of

about 110 MB/sec with an access time of 12.3 ns which is impressive. The disk

also achieved burst rates of 149.2 MB/sec which is not bad either. These scores

are similar with those achieved by  Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB, a high performance

HDD reviewed in Feb 2009, which was also in a similar price range but not meant

for  enterprises. The WD disk seems a much better proposition for the enterprise

because of its specs and features.

Bottomline: The specs, features and pricing make

this disk apt for  enterprises.

* Test Bed: Gigabyte P55A-UD7 motherboard , Intel

Core i5 661 (3.33 GHz) Processor, 2Gb (1800MHz) Patriot DDR3 RAM, NVIDIA GeForce

9600 GT graphic card, Windows 7 Ultimate