Ashton Mills, storage geek, attempts to save his files on fish eggs.
So what sets these 'Raid Edition' drives apart? Mostly, their reliabilty. The focus on these 7200RPM SATA drives is a feature set to ensure an apparent one million hours MBTF - the drives use fluid dynamic bearings, which are quieter and produce less heat - a definite plus for any machine - as well as incorporating shock protection, inbuilt error detection and correction, and a special feature known as 'Time-Limited Error Recovery' which Western Digital claims to improve compatibility with RAID adaptors and prevents drives falling out from extended error-recovery processes. Essentially TLER allows the drive to report when it is running in an error recovery phase and prevent the controller from dropping or degrading its performance in the array to accommodate. This won't help the RAID stripe on your uber gateway, but if you run a RAID 5 fileserver this could be of benefit.
It's important to note that while this should translate to a more reliable drive for use in arrays, Western Digital warns that this makes the drive inappropriate for use outside of one. In other words, don't expect stellar performance if you hook one up as your boot drive, though our testing showed it's no slouch. We tested it for performance in a single and two drive RAID 0 setup with PCMark04 and SiSoft Sandra 2004 to see how it behaved. PCMark04 returned a score of 5390 for a single drive and 6246 with two of the drives in a 16KB stripe RAID 0 array. SiSoft Sandra 2005 reported a clean 50MB/s for a drive on its own and a not too shabby 93MB/s when in RAID formation.
With the industry standard 8MB cache and the usual SATA features such as hotplug support, the Western Digital Caviar RE looks like it's well targeted to be a workhorse drive in your next RAID setup.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012