Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR Review at SR

[EnderW]

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200510/WD4000YR_1.html

In the end, the Caviar RE2 WD4000YR sweeps our high-level performance tests across the board. Equipped with a solid NCQ implementation, the drive's multi-user scores never falter and top the competition whether in a light, a medium, or a heavy load scenario. Combined with the drive's presumed (given the 5-year warranty, 1.2m MTBF, and Raptor-leveraged heritage) reliability, the WD4000YR emerges as today's preeminent 7200 RPM offering for server use.

[DougLite]

More importantly for us, it's desktop brother (WD4000KD) should school all comers, at least in 7200RPM, in terms of raw desktop performance. Like it or lump it, WD is the ATA performance king right now. The only maker that I foresee coming close is Hitachi, but they are content with 8MB buffers on the vast majority of their drives.

[EnderW]

More importantly for us, it's desktop brother (WD4000KD) should school all comers, at least in 7200RPM, in terms of raw desktop performance. Like it or lump it, WD is the ATA performance king right now. The only maker that I foresee coming close is Hitachi, but they are content with 8MB buffers on the vast majority of their drives.
you don't think the Seagate 7200.9 drives will be competitive?

and what's the exact difference between the WD4000YR and WD4000KD anyway? besides the limited error recover and MTBF ratings

[DougLite]

you don't think the Seagate 7200.9 drives will be competitive?

and what's the exact difference between the WD4000YR and WD4000KD anyway? besides the limited error recover and MTBF ratings1) No. Seagate had better get their act together on seek performance - 7200.8 was a debacle IMO. Yes Seagate is still the gold standard in HDD reliability, and they also deliver pretty well in the cool/quiet category, but the application level performance is simply not there. Also, I'm still pretty unhappy with Seagate for locking the AAM settings out of pride, especially when Samsung blows away even their quietest drives. I hope Seagate makes me wrong - I just don't expect it.

2) Only one besides what you already outlined - no NCQ on the KD drive. Not like we need it :)

[Ruffy]

Cool

The 320gb drives I have are damn fast(great review on SR, tho theres reports of 250+ giggers suddenly dying)

[wizzackr]

From storage-review's:

"Despite this stellar performance, however, WD cautions against using the RE2 in a desktop system. The drive's TLER feature expects to be paired with a RAID controller. In the event of an unlikely but possible error situation, the RE2 may not make every attempt to recover when operating on a regular controller as a standard SATA drive would.."

Why is that? Can someone tell me why it wouldn't be recommended to hook that drive up on my nf4 board and be a happy camper? :confused:

[Ultra Wide]

I think it is because the drive relies on the RAID controller to do all the error checking. From what I remember, the RE2 just skips the error-checking or ignores it, so you can see how that would cause problems if not paired with the right controller.

[DougLite]

Ultra is correct, without exhaustive drive level error checking and no error correction implemented in the RAID BIOS, running such a setup is inviting corruption. There is a desktop version of this monster available, WD4000KD. It lacks NCQ, but you don't really need it anyway :)

[wizzackr]

thanks a lot guys, didn't see the KD version of it...

[Slacker]

Well it looks like I made the right decision in deciding to build a RAID 5 array with these drives. Just got one right now in my desktop until the price drops a little. Then I'll get 2-3 more and a RAID card.

[ho72]

and what's the exact difference between the WD4000YR and WD4000KD anyway?

Oh, about 2-4 years less warranty, depending on whether you buy the Retail (1 yr) or OEM (3 yr) version.