2TB WD Green or RE4?

Keltik THC · 6 Dec 2009 at 15:31

I have been trying to decide which HDD is worth the money, i really need a 2TB one as im running out of SATA ports and caddie space.

the RE4 is based on the same power saving technology as the WD Green but the RE4 is designed to be more robust so i believe, in that the components are better quality, designed to be knocked about in server racks and stuff so it comes with an 5 year warranty, they say it also has a 1.2 million hours MTBF.

I wont be running programs from this drive only backing up data so the extra speed/cache of teh RE4 is not important to me just the stability and the longevity.

WD Green = £150

RE4 = £215

is that worth the extra £65? i need to be pushed in either direction because i cant decide.

Keltik THC · 7 Dec 2009 at 08:11

anybody?

56 views and nobody has any input?

surely im not the only person on OCuk who is looking at the 2tb HDDs??

faugusztin · 7 Dec 2009 at 08:29

RE4 is not really what you want. Raid Edition is not simply a more robus WD Green. You must understand that the main difference is the better support for RAID controllers - which means minimal error correction when something problematic happens.
The reason for this is to report timeouts and other problems back to controller ASAP, otherwise the drive will be dropped from RAID.

For standalone drive, this is not what you want - you want as much error correction as possible.

More about this topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

Keltik THC · 10 Dec 2009 at 17:56

thanks faug, i opted for the WD Green, gonna buy more when i start building my home server so i guess the savings of £70 quid multiplied by 5 or 6 drives is quite considerable.