Since their introduction to the PC world, Hard Disk Drivers have been getting bigger and bigger. Technology to pack more onto the platters of a HDD keep getting better to the point where we are now seeing storage capabilities hitting half a terabyte or a whooping 500GB.
Speed on these drives have also been increasing, with speeds from the original 2,300 RPM drives up to 10,000 RPM on the Western Digital Raptor and even higher again on server / enterprise drives - things keep getting better all the time.
One of the most important additions to the desktop market is the inclusion of RAID technologies, which not all that long ago was only reserved for enterprise computing such as servers. This technology, while now very common among consumers, allows for spanning, mirroring and mirroring with spanning, all depending on what your needs are (speed, redundancy or both).
Western Digital has recently introduced a new hard disk drive to the market. It’s dubbed the Caviar RAID Edition or RE2 for short. It is tweaked and designed to offer the best performance when setup in a RAID configuration environment. We’ll take a quick look at the drive and then see how it performs against one of Seagate’s latest hard drives in RAID and non-RAID testing.
