Difference between Western Digital RE drives?

[tankman1989]

I'm looking into some WD drives for a server RAID array and have had great success with WD black edition drives in the past. I'm especially looking at the RAID Edition (RE) drives but am a little confused as to whether there is much difference between them other than price. The two drives I'm most interested in are:

WD2001FYYG ~$200
WD2000FYYZ ~$170

The only difference that I have been able to see is the more expensive one has a 32mb cache while the other has a 64mb cache. I would think the more expensive one would have the larger cache.

Anyone know what the real difference is between these?

 

[closers]

In this case the WD2001FYYG is a SAS drive.

Otherwise when picking between two drives with all else being equal, usually the newer and later the revision the better for platter number and density.

 

[tankman1989]

In this case the WD2001FYYG is a SAS drive.

Otherwise when picking between two drives with all else being equal, usually the newer and later the revision the better for platter number and density.

Wow, I didn't even see that, thanks for pointing that out. I'm kind of torn as to which to get as my server has a Perc 6 SAS card which will run both SAS and SATA, but I would be able to use the SATA on other machines down the road.

Does SAS have any major benefits over SATA? These drives are going to be used for a web server / file server running RAID 5/6 and will mainly be hosting files in the 15mb-1GB file size.

 

[closers]

SAS allows a lot more customization for servers. If we are talking about one hard drive though for a workstation setup SATA is better for that usage pattern. If for multiple drives for server use then get SAS 10-15K, if you want to stick with WD that's their Xe line.