WD RE4 Drives

Dr. Pain · 19 Jul 2011 at 09:03

Hi folks, looking for a little advice.

In my home lab I have a few ML110 G6 boxes, they all come with a 250GB Western Digital RE3 drive.

Now, im looking to speed up drive access a wee bit and get a bit more capacity, as everything else is so quick and high end, the HD's onboard are slowing things down a little.

If I replaced the 250GB RE3, with the WD 500Gb RE4 would I see a noticeable difference in performance?

Toms hardware did a review of the 2TB one, and it blew away a 300Gb Velociraptor, which seems quite impressive to me.

Would the 500Gb one be much slower?

Cheers.

Ringiho · 19 Jul 2011 at 09:19

The RE4s have more cache then the slightly older RE3s.

They (RE4s) are slightly faster when running benchmarks (ATTO or similar) but in the real world I doubt it would make a massive difference.

Bloody good drives though, we use a lot of them at work.

Dr. Pain · 19 Jul 2011 at 09:45

How do the Seagate Constellations compare?

Ringiho · 19 Jul 2011 at 09:49

Similar speed to be honest, we use Seagate and WD Enterprise drives. In the real world they are all pretty fast.

I'd say the WDs are faster as they have more cache on the smaller drives though