[Eugene]

With cost, capacity, and interoperability driving change, SATA drives have made considerable headway into the enterprise sector. Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital have all introduced capacious alternatives squarely aimed at a market served by SCSI and Fibre offerings. StorageReview takes a look at how the NL35.2, MaXLine Pro, and Caviar RE2 stack up!

SATA in the Enterprise - A 500 GB Drive Roundup

[THX]

Storagereview frontpage, on Apr 18 2006, 10:50 AM, said:

A New Leaderboard Category
2006-04-18

The StorageReview Leaderboard has been updated with a new category, our pick for budget installations.

Just around the corner- a look at 500 GB SATA drive from Maxtor and WD!

Does Just around the corner mean two months?
Why does it take so long?
Storagereview could be so good HDD page, only if it had it's reviews at the time (or before) when the other web sites have.
I know you're doing this in your spare time, but maybe if you had always actual drives reviewed (and there are plenty of those drives, including notebook drives, flash drives etc.), you'd become more popular, you'd have more hits on advertisemenst, so you could earn some more $ to run this site and to justify spending your free time. And while becoming more popular, you could receive more (and sooner) disk samples to test.
This really could be so great site.
So what's the biggest problem?

This post has been edited by THX: 13 July 2006 - 11:31 AM

[Ender17]

great article as always Eugene

[John_Glenn]

I was somewhat surprised by the vast differences in the multi-user benchmarks. If I read the graphs correctly, the WD drive does about 40-50% more IOps at greater loads than the Seagate? I was wondering if the read-verification on the Seagate could have any effect here - I suppose it's a small effect, since writes have only a small part in the generated activity. But still...

Isn't there a manufacturer tool that could disable write-verification? I used to have an old Maxtor DM (the last one without fdb, forgot the model name) that could be accessed from a boot floppy to set this...

[Critofur]

Eugene, on Jul 13 2006, 11:50 AM, said:

With cost, capacity, and interoperability driving change, SATA drives have made considerable headway into the enterprise sector. Seagate, Maxtor and Western Digital have all introduced capacious alternatives squarely aimed at a market served by SCSI and Fibre offerings. StorageReview takes a look at how the NL35.2, MaXLine Pro, and Caviar RE2 stack up!

SATA in the Enterprise - A 500 GB Drive Roundup

I see at the conclusion that you really like the WD 500 RE2 drive. I'd be hesitant to buy any Western Digital drives after the horrible quality of their 160 and 200 GB "JB" drives I've been seeing and their poor customer service I recieved in response to the problems that I've been having with multiple consecutive failures of those drives. Perhaps the "RE" and "RE2" drives are really much more reliable? And, if so, how can WD get away with selling such un-reliable drives as the regular "JB" IDE drives seem to be? In my expereince, WD has lately been even worse than IBM during the time of the infamous "Dethstar" drives a few years back.

[mpiskotos]

Excellent review there! I was in a mess trying to figure out what drive would be good for my needs and it seemed to help.

Actually, I was looking for a high capacity sata drive to fit within an eSata enclosure. After realising that the price of enterprise edition disks is not that far away from that of normal disks, I decided that it would be a good idea to have one such disk as it will probably behave better under the stress of a mobile enclosure.

I am leaning towards the WD RE16 400 and 500 GB models but there is a factor that is keeping me from making a decision. On WD's website the nominal temperature of the disks when in operation is 5°C to 55°C for the 400GB model and 5°C to 60°C for the 500GB model. This doesn't make much sense to me given that the 500GB model consumes less power. It would be really interesting to include measurings of the heat emitted from the disks in the review to have a clearer picture of their performance.

I've also had problems in the past with WD disks (I once had to return a 120GB disk twice because it was DOA both times - perhaps a bad batch - and then ask for a Seagate model in the end). Even though I am a bit reluctant, I think I will give WD another shot (all other WD models I owned in the past did work out fine) and go for the 500 GB model.

Does anyone care to comment on using one such drive for an eSata enclosure?

[Enot]

mpiskotos, on Aug 23 2006, 12:43 AM, said:

On WD's website the nominal temperature of the disks when in operation is 5°C to 55°C

Read what exactly is written on WD website. This is not "temperature of the disks".

[mpiskotos]

Enot, on Aug 31 2006, 03:12 AM, said:

mpiskotos, on Aug 23 2006, 12:43 AM, said:

On WD's website the nominal temperature of the disks when in operation is 5°C to 55°C

Read what exactly is written on WD website. This is not "temperature of the disks".

I just looked at the WD site once again.

It states: "Operating Temperature: 5°C to 60°C" for the RE2 500GB model.

I'm not sure I understand what my mistake is. I'm sorry if my english is not so good and it got misunderstood (I'm not a native speaker ).

Anyway I went out and bought the disk after all about a week ago. I also got a Cooler Master Xcraft enclosure with a combo USB 2.0 - eSata connectors. I still have not tried the eSata connection though, since I want to find a PCMCIA eSata adapter for my notebook and I can't seem to find one from a european online store that can deliver to greece for a reasonable price.

I have not measured the temperature of the disk (perhaps one can help by pointing out a utility that can read SMART or other details of a disk in operation) but it seems to be running quite hot (this measurement was made through palm touching and therefore is not very scientific - but can give one an idea). I'm not sure if it's the enclosure's fault or the disk. The enclosure has no fan and is supposed to dispatch heat through aluminum casing. As temperature in greece was quite high lately (more than 30°C) I decided to let the disk run with the enclosure open, which improved things a bit (measurement done by touching the disk itself when in operation and not the enclosure).

I'm still looking for PCMCIA eSata adapter and perhaps I should look for another enclosure (a fan is not such a bad idea after all I think) because I don't want the disk overheating.

Any comments are welcome.

[mpiskotos]

888, on Sep 2 2006, 03:46 PM, said:

mpiskotos, on Sep 2 2006, 02:30 PM, said:

Enot, on Aug 31 2006, 03:12 AM, said:

This is not "temperature of the disks".

It states: "Operating Temperature: 5°C to 60°C" for the RE2 500GB model.
I'm not sure I understand what my mistake is.

Operating temperature is the temperature of surrounding environment (air around the HDD).
The temperature of HDD itself and its internal disks is usually 15...23 C more (higher).

thanks 888.

That sorts things out. I should have known though (makes sense: operating temperature = enviromental temperature for sth to operate). Please excuse my newbiness....

so, higher operating temperature specified my manufacturer = better drive, I suppose?

and I guess I should be worrying if I read internal temperatures of the WD RE2 YR5000 (through appropriate software) of more than 80°C when operating inside the enclosure...

hmmm...