Specs, Testing Methodology and System Setup
Specifications
I have a habit of translating Western Digital's marketing speak when we cover specs. I'll continue this trend here. Some of these are not specifically listed by WD, but we know they are in there, so we will keep them here for your education:
- NoTouch™ ramp load technology — Previously called "IntelliPark". Drive heads take an 'exit ramp' off of the platters instead of landing on the platters when the drive is spun down. You know how the most damage is done to your engine when you start it on a cold morning? This means the drive heads do not have to break stiction each and every time the drive spins up. The heads are able to leave the ramp and float onto the spinning disk.
- Native Command Queuing (NCQ) — The drive can reorder groups of reads/writes to minimize overall head movement, and therefore increase effective access time. Beware – this is only effective with an AHCI-enabled SATA controller.
- Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) — Bits are aligned vertically instead of horizontally to get more packed onto each platter. Think dominoes (the game, not the food).
- 64MB cache — Basically standard across most current WD models, though this part is faster than those previous. Increased cache speed helps boost random access performance.
- Dual processors — Introduced with the RE4-GP line, the additional core helps the drive keep track of the added cache and increased throughput streaming off of the head pack.
- Advanced Format — Introduced back in late 2009, this increases storage efficiency and robustness by having the drive handle data as 4KB internal blocks. This means error correction routines are not limited to 512B segments. ECC works better on larger chunks of data, and this gives an ~50% improvement in that area. The trade-off is random access for blocks <4KB will suffer, but this is not much of an issue as the vast majority of file access is >= 4KB.
Enterprise features:
- RAID-specific time-limited error recovery (TLER) — The drive limits the 'hang' experienced on a read error in order to avoid a RAID controller considering the drive dead / offline.
- Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward (RAFF™) — I've got nothing. Just kidding. More on this near the end of the article.
The load/unload spec (for the ramp load technology) remains at 600,000 cycles. Shouldn't be an issue for an enterprise unit under 24/7 operation.
Specific to this Review
Today we will be comparing the RE to the rest of the pack tested in the WD Red review:

For this piece we stuck with the native 6Gb SATA controller on the Sandy Bridge test bed. We are using only the Intel SATA 6Gb/sec ports for any unit under test. PC Perspective would like to thank ASUS, Corsair, and Kingston for supplying some of the components of our test rig.
Hard Drive Test System Setup | |
CPU | Intel Core i5-2500K |
Motherboard | Asus P8Z68-V Pro |
Memory | Kingston HyperX 4GB DDR3-2133 CL9 |
Hard Drive | G.Skill 32GB SLC SSD |
Sound Card | N/A |
Video Card | Intel® HD Graphics 3000 |
Video Drivers | Intel |
Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-650TX |
DirectX Version | DX9.0c |
Operating System | Windows 7 X64 |
- PCMark05
- Yapt
- IOMeter
- HDTach *omitted due to incompatibility with 3TB devices*
- HDTune
- PCPer File Copy Test
It’s RAID edition review
It’s RAID edition review without RAID benchmarks, right? Did I miss something or maybe you are not provided enough drives for RAID testing?
All of these drive tend to
All of these drive tend to scale similarly when in a RAID, depending more on the RAID controller than the drive itself. WD had a very limited number of samples for the new RE.
Me gusta! :3
Me gusta! :3
To answer the first fellow’s
To answer the first fellow’s question. That is simply the name of the drive not what the review entails. RE is short for Raid Edition.
I have always wanted a
I have always wanted a SSD….Now i want 4 terabyte of hard drive space….
I am curious, do you think
I am curious, do you think the 2TB and 3TB would perform the same as the 4TB version? Will the lower amount of platters and heads cost some performance to the lower capactiy drives?
What I also wonder about is the new line of specific SAS models. Aou can plug a SATA drive in a SAS controller without any problems, so why the specific SAS line?
Thanks!
You can plug a SAS device
You can plug a SAS device into a SATA controller but NOT a SATA device into a SAS controller.
You’re backwards on that :).
You're backwards on that :). Most SAS RAID controllers can handle SATA.
In fact, it’s exactly the
In fact, it’s exactly the other way around.