Western Digital Caviar RE2 – Tweaked RAID 0 storage

Vote: Thumbs Down or Thumbs Up Our Rating: 9.0%       Manufacturer: Western Digital

Final Thoughts

It is clear that HDD technology has taken a turn for the better.

For 10 years hard disk drivers have been on the same old parallel interface with only two drivers per channel. Now SATA is here as well as in full swing and we can have as many channels as a chipset manufacturer wants to allow. And with speeds now hitting 300MB/s in transfer rates, there is no reason why these hard drives cannot last another 5 years as the storage medium of choice.

When we reviewed the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 hard drive, we were impressed with it a lot – in fact, it received an award for its performance. We are impressed with the Western Digital WD5000YS RAID Edition when setup in RAID 0 but in single drive mode, it is behind the 7200.9.

Therefore, if you’re looking for a single drive setup for your PC, you’re probably better off sticking to Seagate. However, if RAID 0 is your thing, Western Digital has tuned their latest Caviar RAID Edition 2 drives perfectly and they’ll be a great option for you.

While solid state is on the horizon, we have to deal with the here and now in our busy technological age. Western Digital’s RAID Edition 2 hard disk drive is more than capable of producing the power and the storage capabilities of an enterprise environment with two drives in RAID 0, for the performance hungry desktop users, through its tweaked RAID engineering – and they are priced quite reasonably, too.

- Pros

Great performance when in RAID 0

Up to 500GB models available

16MB cache

SATA 150MB/s or 300MB/s options

Molex power connector for older PSU’s

RAID Optimised (RAID 0 is your friend with these drives)

Reasonable pricing, roughly on par with Seagate

5 year warranty

- Cons

Single drive mode performance struggles a little at times

- Latest Pricing

Rating – 9 out of 10 and TweakTown’s “MUST HAVE” Best Performance Award