| Article Index |
|---|
| Western Digital 750GB SATA-II Caviar RE2 Review |
| Page 2 - PC Mark05 |
| Page 3 - SiSoft Sandra |
| Page 4 - HD Tune |
| Page 5 - Conclusion |
| All Pages |
A hard drive aimed at the enterprise market and touted by Western Digital as being
ultra-reliable and ideally suited to server and RAID systems. We take a look and see if it justifies its price premium over Western Digital’s standard SATA drives.
The RE2 (RAID Edition 2) range of drives from Western Digital are standard Serial-ATA-II interface hard drives that are designed to be used in more critical environments than you would normally trust with standard desktop drives. Environments and situations that a few years back would have been the exclusive territory of SCSI hard drives, such as servers, RAID arrays, network storage, video surveillance recording etc. Now these situations can be handled with much lower priced Serial-ATA drives with supposedly the same level of reliability.
The RE2 drives are reported by Western Digital to have a 1.2 million hour MTBF (mean time before failure), which compared to an average desktop drive of around 700,000 hours, is a big improvement. How they test these MTBF figures I’ll never know, because 1.2million hours is about 136 years, and I know most of my drives will never last that long. Nevertheless it shows that at least the manufacturer has faith in the drives reliability, they also back it up with a 5-year warranty.
Other features reported by Western Digital include (claimed) best in its class vibration tolerance, so when it’s used in rack-mounted servers and arrays it can better deal with the associated vibrations. Other features are also included which are only used when the drive is in a RAID array, such as a Time Limited Error Recovery feature, so the drive will not endlessly attempt its error recovery processes which can actually lead to drive failure on hard drives. All these features, whether they’re really that effective or not, show that the drive has been engineered to be as reliable as possible for more mission-critical applications then you would normally trust a standard desktop drive to handle.
Although this is a RAID edition drive, we’ve only been given a single drive to review and test by Western Digital, so we’re going to test the only real feature of the drive that we can test, its performance. And we’re going to do this against similar sized but significantly cheaper drives to see if its performance can help justify its price tag, all if it’s all about the apparent reliability factor and nothing more.
We’ll be testing the drive on our standard OzHardware test bench which consists of the following hardware:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU
- ASUS P5N32-E SLI, nForce680i Motherboard
- Corsair TWIN2X 2GB PC2-8500 Memory Kit (2 x 1GB)
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB SATA-II Hard Drive (System Drive)
- Antec Basiq 500W ATX Power Supply
- Windows XP Pro SP2
We will be comparing the Western Digital 750GB RE2 (WD7500AYYS) drive against its desktop equivalent, the Western Digital 750GB SE16 (WD7500AAKS) as well as the popular 750GB drive on the market, the Seagate 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 (ST3750640AS). All three drives are 7200rpm, Serial-ATA-II with 16MB Cache as well as NCQ (Native Command Queing) so we’ll see how they all stack up when we put them through their paces.
Before we get to the tests though, it should be noted that the Western Digital SE16 and RE2 drives we have here are very, VERY similar on the outside, and not just in the way that all hard drives look alike. Not only is it the exact same casing (which most Western Digital drives are), but the circuit board underneath is exactly the same, even down to the revision number, so I wonder how different they really are?
First Test – PCMark05
The first cab of the rank is PCMark05’s hard drive test suite, which tests a number of different usage situations instead of just the drives ability to read or write a huge file as quickly as it can:
These first results really did surprise me as I was not expecting the RE2 to be so much quicker than its desktop counterpart the SE16. In the general usage test we see the RE2 has a 22% speed increase over the SE16 as well as the Barracuda. Application loading see’s the RE2 with a 15-17% increase over the other two drives and XP Start-up with a 12 and 20% increase. All very substantial performance gains for drives with very similar specifications.
The second set of PCMark05 tests focus more on the drives throughput ability, and in this case we see the two Western Digital drives performing very similar to one another with the lower priced SE16 coming out slightly in front, while the Seagate Barracuda jumps around the graph a bit. The Barracuda is significantly slower on the virus scan test with the RE2 being a whopping 33% faster, while the Barracuda gains back some ground in the file write test, being almost 10% faster than the RE2 and 5% faster than the SE16.
Next – SiSoft Sandra:
We put the drives through the full range of SiSoft Sandra’s Physical Drive and File System benchmarks, which go into a bit more detail than the PCMark tests.
The first test results shown above are from the Physical Disk test, which tests the average drive throughput speed. In this case we see both the Western Digital drives are closely matched and are ahead by a surprising amount over the Seagate drive. In the end it’s the cheaper Western Digital SE16 that comes out on top, even if only marginally.
SiSoft Sandra’s File System benchmark performs three types of tests for both reading and writing to the drive. Firstly a random read test with the heads moving all over the drive, a sequential read which reads from one track so there’s no head movement, and in this case it looks to be from the fastest part of the platter, and a buffered read, which really tests how fast the drive can push data down the SATA-II interface from its buffer.
We can see that both the Western Digital drives are almost identical with the cheaper SE16 being slightly in front in all the tests, while both Western Digital’s are well out in front of the Seagate drive in all areas.
It’s a similar situation for the write tests with the Western Digital drives both having nearly identical results and the Seagate lagging rather significantly behind.
These tests are showing a clear trend of the two Western Digital drives having near identical performance, despite their significant difference in price.
Next – HD Tune:
The HD Tune benchmark tests and graphs the drive’s performance from the first to the last sector, it measures drive throughput in MB/s and average access times (seek times)
The graphs above once again confirm the performance advantage the two Western Digital drives have over the Seagate, with the performance being much higher through the whole range, and with both Western Digital drives being nearly identical once again.
Conclusion:
The performance tests we’ve conducted here today have shown that the clear winners in terms of performance across the board are both Western Digital drives, the basic SE16 and the more expensive RE2 versions were nearly identical, with only the PCMark05 tests putting the RE2 in front. The Western Digital 750GB RE2 sells online for around AU$375, while the SE16 version sells for just AU$280, that’s a very substantial price difference. (The Seagate 750GB Barracuda 7200.10 we tested sells for AU$320)
Given the price difference between the drives, if you were after a 750GB hard drive for your desktop machine, you’d be silly to overlook the Caviar SE16 from Western Digital, but if you’re after a drive for a server or more mission critical situation, you really have to make up your own mind on whether the hype and claimed features of the RE2 are actually going to be of any benefit to you. If you have a redundant RAID setup with hot-swap drives, does it really matter if you go cheap and a drive dies every now and then? Or should you invest the extra money and hope the RAID version hard drives are more reliable? Sadly this is something we cannot test in just a few days, but whichever way you go, you won’t be unhappy with the performance of either Western Digital drives.
OzHardware Rating – 8/10
You can purchase this product online at www.techbuy.com.au (Direct Link)
