Western Digital RE4 2TB Enterprise Grade 'RAID Edition' HDD

2010-07-10 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: hard drive, RAID, RAID-0, storage

Western Digital RE4 2.0TB

Don’t confuse this drive with the slightly lower-priced RE4 “Green Power” version, which might not match its performance (not tested).

However, the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black (non enterprise) is nearly as fast as the RE4.

I put a pair of the new RE4 drives through their paces. Remarkably, the two samples tested within 1MB/sec of each other (141/142 and 148/149), with outstanding consistency during the test (many drives offer somewhat variable performance with each test run showing slightly different results).

Auditory

The RE4 is very quiet even in use, I could hardly tell they were installed in my Mac Pro. Nor did I hear any oddball recalibration noise as is found with some drives.

Of course, when heavy disk seeking is happening the RE4 makes the usual seeking noise that all hard drives do, but it’s not particularly different than most drives.

Performance

The Western Digital RE4 is the fastest SATA hard drive I’ve tested as of July 2010, but as of November 2010, the 3TB Hitachi Deskstar surpasses it.

I tested sequential read and write speed both singly and in a RAID-0 stripe. Testing was performed with DiskTester, part of the diglloydTools software suite, using the run-sequential command.

All speeds on this page freshly tested with Mac OS X 10.6.4, which appears to have improved read/write speed slightly, because the Hitachi 7K200 is testing 5-7MB/sec faster than my tests on 10.6.1 in late 2009. Speeds here are two samples averaged; individual drives can vary significantly.

Performance of Western Digital RE4 2TB enterprise hard drive, relative to Hitachi 7K2000

RAID-0 stripe of two drives

A RAID-0 stripe of two drives offers outstanding performance.

Performance of Western Digital RE4 2TB enterprise hard drive, relative to Hitachi 7K2000

Conclusions

As of July 2010, the Western Digital RE4 2TB is the fastest SATA drive I’ve yet tested.

The performance level is high enough that the speed of just a 2-drive RAID-0 stripe should suffice for all but the most demanding users. This drive would be an excellent choice for the MPG Pro Workstation for users seeking the highest possible hard drive performance.

The RE4 is also an enterprise grade drive, which implies higher reliability. That reliability, along with apparent best-in-class performance means that this is a great choice for demanding users.

Where to buy

Get the Western Digital RE4 at OWC, along with their 90-day drive-swap guarantee.