WD SE Drives

[Pultzar]

Looks like WD has released some new drives just below the RE drives in specifications. Perhaps these would be a more reliable alternative to the RED drives along with a 4tb option?

They are labeled as enterprise drives, although the specified URE rate is higher than the RE drives.

 

[jimblue]

I have suspicions that a lot of these numbers drive manufacturers put on spec sheets are just made up. If a spec sheet's 10^14 unrecoverable bit error rate is accurate, we would have problems reading data on average once every 12.5TB. That's about three passes of the largest drive available today, but I am not aware of real world rates anywhere as bad as that. Even if both classes of drives boast an URE of <1 in 10^15, by listing the consumer ones as having an URE of <1 in 10^14, it would appear they were an order of magnitude less reliable. While the numbers are technically still correct, it's misleading.

That said, there probably are firmware optimizations (and artificial restrictions) between the lines. We'll have to wait until they're out in the wild before passing judgement.

Looks like there's a review here: http://www.storagereview.com/wd_se_hdd_review