WD RE4 7200 RPM Enterprise SATA hard drives offer capacities up to 2 TB, loaded with performance and reliability features ideal for servers, video surveillance, and other demanding write-intensive applications. With a designed, manufactured and demonstrated MTBF of 1.2 million hours at 100{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3} duty cycle in nominal enterprise conditions, 64 MB cache, and best-in-class vibration tolerance, these drives are the ultimate in Enterprise SATA storage. Backed by a 5-year limited warranty.
$ 92.20
[wpramareviews asin=”B003SANWI6″]
And, there was much happiness…,
I’m not normally a fan of SATA drives, I’ve worked extensively with SAS/SCSI drives for servers/etc for the last 20 years and only used ATA/SATA when required.
Still, I’ve had some projects come up recently where the only option was SATA and high capacity was required.
After some bad experiences with the WDC Cavier Black 2TB, I gave the RE4 a try. It’s been great. I’ve now had 5 of them running for the last six months and the SMART monitoring reports still show the drives as in almost new condition…no errors, no need for sector changes, no unusual increases of load cycle counts, etc. Performance has also been very good….surprisingly good for a mere 7200rpm device. Not to mention, the drives seem to work nicely in both software and hardware raid. I’ll probably end up buying another 5 of them soon.
I’ll be very happy if I can keep the failure rate to under 4{b81fbfd19e1fca5890798868c0714c408bbd5ec471654b6f9630c0fffa6e7eb3}/yr….this historically is a good rate for SATA/ATA.
I’m not sure what to think about WDC…..I generally prefer seagate, but the RE4 drives certainly seems to be able to back up its claim as an enterprise SATA drive.
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|Big Daddy with huge cache,
I was skeptical at first.
But I bought two, and put in a RAID1 mirror config, in a 8-drive raid box with 2 x multilane infiniband interfaces and a RocketRaid card.
The 64MB cache is noticeable, totally. It is not hype. On average, I get 100MB/sec copying across a gigabit network in the LAN from one machine to this RAID volume. In a similar test (using the same source machine, to a volume of 750GB AAKS’, I get ~82MB/sec across the wire. Again, the cache is noticeable in my tests.
I am amazed at the quality of this drive.
I recommend these drives to anyone who needs to use a RAID config, and needs capacity, and reliability.
I only use WD, period.
I currently own 46 hard drives, all WD.
The only WD hard drive I ever had fail, was a green 750GB one.
The older AAKS series was phenomenal, and these are the new ones to get!
(I have had drives fail a great deal using other manufacturers)
appdevman
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|Solid Performer at a Fair Price,
I bought this to replace a Seagate backup drive that lacked enough room for drive images. The WD5003 is quiet and speedy and comes with a 5-year Enterprise warranty. No problems with it at all.
Buyers have been complaining about Amazon’s poor bare-drive packaging in many of the reviews I’ve read. However, this drive was packaged properly in a box of its own made by WD, with plastic end caps suspending the drive over the bottom of the box. This package was put in another box with the rest of the items I ordered and a couple of air pillows. Perhaps Amazon has listened to the well-founded complaints and revised their bare-drive shipping accordingly. Then again, it might only apply to this particular hard drive.
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