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