Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR

This "ATA specialist" of sorts, however, has been noticeably slow in migrating from the older parallel ATA standard to the new serial ATA interface. Though the firm supplied the Caviar "JD" series, these drives remained PATA designs retrofit for SATA operation via a bridged design. It is only over the summer, with the arrival of the SE16 series, that WD finally caught up to its competitors with the introduction of a drive designed from the ground up for the SATA interface. And though the Caviar WD2500KS featured a 300 MB/sec SATA interface, the drive lacked the Native Command Queuing feature found on drives such as the Seagate Barracuda and Maxtor MaXLine. Taken with the firm's relative lag in capacity and the lack of significant performance increases since the original 8 MB buffer drives, WD's once glamorous drives eventually became rather pedestrian.

Thus we turn to WD's latest entry, the Caviar RE2. The original Caviar RE (Raid Edition) was built on the firm's long-standing PATA Caviar blueprint. A tightening of manufacturing tolerances and improved error handing combined to represent WD's first foray into the nearline enterprise storage sector, one where cost per gigabyte is a metric more important than raw I/Os per second. The RE2, however, is a totally new beast. Although it features a 7200 RPM spindle speed and though it is equipped with native SATA electronics, the RE2 leverages much of its physical engineering from WD's 10,000 RPM Raptor. In fact, the RE2 borrows so much from the Raptor family that the firm seriously considered a name such as "Raptor 7200."

As a four-platter setup, however, the Caviar RE2 far outstrips the Raptor's 73 GB capacity. Four 100 GB platters combine to yield 400 GB of storage, a size that finally matches the flagships of the competition. WD specs the Caviar's average seek time at 8.9 milliseconds, a standard figure recited for some time now. The RE2's buffer conforms to the newer, roomy 16 MB standard.

The RE2's consumer-oriented counterpart, the Caviar SE16, boasts an SATA-2 style 300 MB/sec interface but lacks Native Command Queuing (NCQ). While command queuing's value is undisputed in the server world, WD argues that its inclusion in a drive hinders desktop performance... hence its omission on the SE16. At this point, the disadvantage NCQ lends to single-user operation is debatable. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 often performs better with queuing disabled yet Maxtor's MaXLine III demonstrates improvement across the board with queuing enabled. At any rate, as an enterprise-aimed part, the RE2 reverses situation- it incorporates NCQ but maintains a more conservative 150 MB/sec transfer rate.

WD pulls no punches when it comes to claimed reliability. Unlike competing nearline products that also feature 1 million+ hours of MTBF, the firm boasts that the Raptor-leveraged RE2 is capable of a 24x7 100% duty cycle... no "eight hours a day" stuff here. As a result, in addition to eyeing the nearline sector itself, the RE2 solidly targets the first-line entry-level server drive sector. In fact, WD touts the drive's "Time Limited Error Recovery" (TLER) ability, a feature that enables better drive-controller coordination in mutually handling drive errors (see here for more information). The drawback, however, is that the RE2 expects to operate off of a RAID controller and is as a result not recommended for use in a standard desktop system. An enterprise-class 5-year warranty backs the drive.

On paper, at least, the Caviar RE2 addresses many of the areas in which WD has come up short lately. Does it truly deliver? Let's turn to our tests and find out! The 400 GB Caviar RE2 WD4000YR will be compared against the following drives in the tests that follow: