Western Digital RE2 WD5000YS Hard Drive

This drive is meant for server class systems. It's
basically a RAID Edition hard drive, which is said to be the one of the most
reliable server-class SATA drives in the market. The reliability factor ensures
that the hard drive will not fail in mission critical applications and can
sustain the load for I/O intensive applications. WD RE2 hard drive is engineered
and manufactured for enterprise-class standards and has features like
Time-limited Error Recovery. Generally, the desktop drives, in the event of a
failure, pause for few minutes for data recovery. WD RE2 is

designed to prevent hard drive error recovery fallout by limiting the drive's
error recovery time. 

Price: Rs 17,500 (5 yrs warranty)

Key Specs: 500GB, 7,200rpm, SATA II

Contact: Champion Computers, Delhi Tel: 26214751 E-mail: champion@usa.net

The drive has a huge capacity of 500 GB and a spindle speed
of 7,200 rpm. It even supports SATA II for higher data transfer rate and has got
a buffer memory of 16MB. The rated seek time of the drive is 8.7 milliseconds.

We tested it on an Athlon FX machine with 512MB RAM.
Compared to the similar specification Seagate 7200   rpm 500GB drive
that we reviewed in March 2006, WD drive performed

better at an average transfer rate of 58.1 MBps. Though the Seagate and the
Western Digital drives scores for the Business Disk Winmark 99 were same but the
Western Digital drive scored better against the Seagate in the High-End Disk
Winmark 99 at 33.3 while the Seagate scored only 26MBps. CPU utilization was
high at around 96%.

Bottom Line: This drive provides a good blend of low
price and good performance.

With high data transfer rates and features that are
supposed to make it more reliable, it's a good option for server class
applications, or even fit for applicances like NAS, firewalls, etc. The 5 years
warranty comes as an added incentive to buy the drive.

Anubhav Verma