Introduction

When Seagate released their 1.5TB drive it took the storage community by surprise. At the time companies were just getting their 1TB drives perfected with second generation products starting to make their way to market. Western Digital had other plans and didn't see 1.5TB as a worthwhile place to plant a flag on their roadmap at the time. Instead of hitting the 1.5TB mark Western Digital wanted to take the next step and shoot for a 2TB product, doubling the capacity of their previous product and as we found out back in February the move paid off well for the company.

The two terabyte mark worked out well for Western Digital and consumers instantly fell in love with the new ultra high capacity product. The only real downside was price, but as we predicted the price fell within a few months making them affordable for enthusiasts and regular Joe Sixpack users alike.

Enterprise users, enthusiasts who like to install enterprise products in their desktops and consumers with small business class NAS servers are always looking for a little more out of their storage devices. For these users Western Digital has built a successful Raid Edition line of products. The RE drives have tighter tolerances from the factory and in the case of the new RE4-GP, improved electronics.

Today are will be taking a look at the new Western Digital RE4-GP hard drive, the technology behind the new drive and even see what happens when you put a pair of these enterprise drives in RAID 0 on a high performance controller.