Seagate 7200.10 or WD RE2?

[SpiderWaffle]

I was going to get a single 500GB HDD of either the Seagate 7200.10 or the WD RE2. Both have 16MB caches and 5-year warranties and cost about the same. I think they have different kinds of features and shit so I'm not sure which does better there.

So which do you think is the better HDD?

 

[PC_User]

7200.10 is the regular SATA drive. RE2 is an enterprise drive. I don't know exactly how it works for WD, but for Seagate, the enterprise drives are a bit slower than the regular (7200.10) drives, but they are meant to be running 24/7. If you don't plan to have it on 24/7, I don't see the point in getting an enterprise drive. In the end, it's pretty much the same unless you're very much inclined on speed. Here is a chart comparing various drives. I believe both the Seagate and WD are good, but the WD is usually a bit cheaper and has 2 years less warranty.

 

[rodsfree]

Another issue, IIRC is that the enterprise level of drives expect more of the drive controller than a desktop drive. What I'm not exactly sure, but I was told to stay away from all enterprise drives except for the RAPTORs unless I had a dedicated contraller like an Areca.

Just my $1.85 ($0.02 adjusted for inflation)

 

[Sparkyy]

. I believe both the Seagate and WD are good, but the WD is usually a bit cheaper and has 2 years less warranty.

Actually if you go to westerndigital.com and click on their RE2 series, it says:

WD RE2 hard drives are the world’s most reliable server-class SATA drives in the market. With 1.2 million hours MTBF, 5-year limited warranty, 3 Gb/s SATA technology, and best-in-class vibration tolerance, WD RE2 drives offer the best combination of superior reliability, high capacity, and optimum performance for enterprise applications.

The RE and RE2 drives are meant to be used in a 24/7 setting where there is a lot of drives running and causing vibration and are on a dedicated RAID card, they supposedly can be used as a desktop drive but you could run in to issues as the drives will not repairs sectors the same way desktop drives are designed too. However because of this, they will not drop out of arrays as easily as desktop drives.

 

[Skud]

There is also a utility floating around that will disable TLER on the Western Digital RE drives. This essentially gets rid of the "dedicated controller" requirement and turns them into a drive suitable for desktop use.

I bought 8 500GB RE2s off of Ebay awhile back. 5 of them went into my server with a Dell PERC 5/i SAS RAID controller and the other 3 I turned off TLER and put them in some Antec MX-1 eSATA enclosures... Works perfectly..

Riley

 

[unhappy_mage]

What I'm not exactly sure, but I was told to stay away from all enterprise drives except for the RAPTORs unless I had a dedicated contraller like an Areca.

The WD RE drives time out earlier than their desktop equivalents when doing error recovery.

There is also a utility floating around that will disable TLER on the Western Digital RE drives. This essentially gets rid of the "dedicated controller" requirement and turns them into a drive suitable for desktop use.

Here, for anyone interested.

 

[SpiderWaffle]

So if I got the RE2 I'd want that TLER disabling utility. Could I just run that after I install XP on the drive?

Anyone else have some thoughts about which drive would be better? I want this drive to last for a long time. I've read some newegg reviews about OEM 7200.10s getting banged around before shipping and coming DOA.

 

[FanZ]

while i dont recommend you doing this, i've been using two re2 drives with it's default TLER enabled as regular non-RAIDed drives.

so far so good...

personally, i'd just get whichever's cheaper.