[Eugene]

WD's second stab at a 7200 RPM enterprise-class drive is quite a different beast than the original "Raid Edition" Caviar. Designed from the ground up as an SATA drive and featuring the manufacturer's first implementation of NCQ, this 400 GB drive harbors much promise. Does the RE2 deliver? Let's find out!

Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR Review

[Shining Arcanine]

Eugene, have considered measuring decibel count from a meter away like silentpcreview.com does? The people who run SPCR find the figures found at a meter away to be much more accurate than those right next to the drive.

[Eugene]

Quote

Eugene, have considered measuring decibel count from a meter away like silentpcreview.com does? The people who run SPCR find the figures found at a meter away to be much more accurate than those right next to the drive.

I have. What I don't have, however, is the equiment and environment to pick up and distinguish between what in the end are predominately quiet devices in an absolute sense. 1 meter away is quite far for a standard type II meter and requires a heavily treated chamber to be reliable...

[Shining Arcanine]

SPCR doesn't use a chamber. They just use a high quality microphone and a quiet ambient environment. 3.5" hard drives make more noise than the typical quiet ambient environment. It might be hard to measure 2.5" hard drives with that setup depending on various factors but SPCR has done it. You might want to read their article on their hard drive testing methodology:

http://www.silentpcr...e242-page1.html

[Eugene]

I think they' mentioned in various articles that ambient noise is 18 db or so, however... my type II meter seems to bottom out at about 32 or so. 18 ambient is -very- quiet.

[Shining Arcanine]

What makes the ambient noise level where you live 32 decibels? That is more noise than my PC makes.

This post has been edited by Shining Arcanine: 19 October 2005 - 06:53 PM

[ho]

Quote

...WD cautions against using the RE2 in a desktop system. The drive's TLER feature expects to be paired with a RAID controller. In the event of an unlikely but possible error situation, the RE2 may not make every attempt to recover when operating on a regular controller as a standard SATA drive would..

Does this apply if the drive is used on a RAID capable controller (nForce4), but not utilized in a RAID configuration? I would like to use one of these drives as a storage disk in a graphics workstation (Tyan K8E, Athlon X2 4400+), but I don't want to risk data corruption/integrity.

Thanks.

[jang]

ho, on Oct 20 2005, 03:19 AM, said:

Quote

...WD cautions against using the RE2 in a desktop system. The drive's TLER feature expects to be paired with a RAID controller. In the event of an unlikely but possible error situation, the RE2 may not make every attempt to recover when operating on a regular controller as a standard SATA drive would..

Does this apply if the drive is used on a RAID capable controller (nForce4), but not utilized in a RAID configuration? I would like to use one of these drives as a storage disk in a graphics workstation (Tyan K8E, Athlon X2 4400+), but I don't want to risk data corruption/integrity.

Thanks.

I would like to know this too!
I'm just dying to use this drive in a desktop based system, but NOT in a raid array!
I wish there was some way to just manually disable this TLER feature!

[Olaf van der Spek]

Most benchmarks appear to favour bigger drives. But SR only tests the biggest drive in a family.
Wouldn't it be interesting to test (at least once) also smaller drives to see how capacity affects performance?
Often the drive with one platter less than the biggest drive has the best capacity/price ratio. So is it safe to use the benchmarks for the bigger drive to decide to buy the smaller driver?

[GIGANTOID]

Eugene, on Oct 19 2005, 08:39 AM, said:

WD's second stab at a 7200 RPM enterprise-class drive is quite a different beast than the original "Raid Edition" Caviar. Designed from the ground up as an SATA drive and featuring the manufacturer's first implementation of NCQ, this 400 GB drive harbors much promise. Does the RE2 deliver? Let's find out!

Western Digital Caviar RE2 WD4000YR Review

I knew I should have waited for the review instead of investing in the Maxline IIIs, they were a great price though. I'm glad WD is putting out (keeps on) great hrad drives. Hopefully the quality will hold up over the long run.