Western Digital 2TB RE4 WD2003FYYS Review – The Fastest 2TB Internal Hard Drive

If you’re one of those hungry for speed enthusiast and looking for the fastest 2TB internal hard drive, the Western Digital 2TB RE4 is the king in this category. The RE4 is almost the same as the WD 2TB Caviar Black, but loaded with a feature that increases its reliability that makes your data even safer. This is an enterprise drive that is built to gain extra speed besides its reliability.

What Makes The WD RE4 Fast?

The Western Digital RE4 is all about speed, Engineers at this company are devoted to create a state of the art lightning fast hard drive. This hard drive is pack with huge disk space of 2TB, to make sure that you never run out of storage for your wide collection of files. The WD RE4 runs at 7,200rpm for fast data transfer, making all your programs and games runs at vast speed.

To further add in its speed, a 64MB cache buffer is included to store most frequently used data’s for faster access time in a SATA 3GB/s interface. The WD RE4 is made of 4 platters in a 3.5 inch form factor. It has a total of 8 read/write heads and 500GB each platter capacity.

A dual processor design to make it twice the performance you’ll need. A dual actuator technology is added for accurate head positioning. The first actuator serves as for coarse displacement using the electromagnetic actuator and the second uses a piezoelectric motion to fine tune its head positioning. In this kind of technology, you get a fast head positioning for accurately fast data access. With the Dual Actuator, a 0.4ms improvement in access time compare to other drives.

The RE4 has a drive shaft anchored at both ends not only in just one end. This feature called the StableTrac, it further reduces the vibrations and noise while increasing its life span. This improves more durability and a silent running drive compare to other hard drives.

All Western Digital hard drives feature a “No Touch” technology. It means that, all read/write heads never touch the platters and automatically park at shuts down. Western Digital is giving a 5 year warranty to make sure of your purchase.

The WD RE4 enterprise is equipped with more additional features for making it more reliable. The multi-axis sensor protects the data written on the drive by automatically detects any shock events that may occur. The RAFF enhancement technology sophisticatedly monitors the drive to correct both linear and rotational vibration, thus resulting in a more reliable drive even in a high vibration environment.

To increase further its reliability, each drive is put into a burn-in-test in 24/7 operation with thermal cycling. In addition to that, each read/write head is adjusted in Dynamic Fly High in real time for optimum reliability. Another is the Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), this prevents the drive fallout caused by the extended drive error which is mostly common with desktop drives.

Performance

The Western Digital RE4 was tested against the 3 hard drives with the same capacity of 2TB. Among these are the Seagate Barracuda XT 2TB, WD Caviar Black 2TB and WD Caviar Green 2TB. All drives are running at 7,200rpm except for the WD Caviar Green which is only at 5,400rpm.

For this test, we make two partitions on the same disk, a file was created on one partition and to be copied in the other partition. File transfer on the same drive on a different partition forces the drive to do two tasks at the same time that puts them under heavy loads. The first is reading the files on the source drive, second is writing on the destination drive.  The time to complete these operations is measured with the speed of the drives, one is for reading and the other one is for writing.

The first test was the large file transfer with 3.4GB size. The Write/Read speed performance is measured in MB/sec, a higher score means better.

WD RE4 rules the read speed while the WD Caviar Black tops in write. The Seagate Barracuda XT was slightly quicker in read compare with WD Caviar Black, but slower in write. The WD Caviar green as we expected is the slowest, it’s harder for them to compete against the 7,200rpm drive.

The next test is the Sequential Read/Write speed using the Crystal Disk Mark 2.2 measured in MB/sec, higher score is better it means a faster drive performance.

This time, the Barracuda XT dominates the write speed and the WD Caviar Black rules the read speed. However, the WD RE4 doesn’t tops on both category it shows the most impressive performance and having a very small margin compare with those two competing drive.

Conclusion

The Western Digital 2TB RE4 shows the most impressive performance with all of these competing drives. The WD Caviar Black in second place with the Seagate Barracuda XT on third, although not much in a bigger way. These two are also worthy to be a great contender, the WD Caviar Green is not made for speed but rather for a cool and energy saver storage drive.

The additional features of the RE4 enterprise level don’t go far the leads in terms of speed performance, but still those advancement pays off. The main focus for this drive is reliability that keeps your data even more secure. These are the reasons why it is perfect for servers that demands write intensive applications as well as for longer time operations.

What about the price? The price for the WD RE4 is $70 higher than the Barracuda XT and $80 compare with the Caviar Black at this time. Is the price difference worth? Yes, beside its speed performance it’s got the highest reliability you can get in any hard drive which is most important in keeping your most valuable data safe.

If the price would not be a problem, and your craving for an extra speed and a more secure data, go for it! Click Here to get it at its Lowest Price!