Introduction

At the beginning of the year we saw the introduction of the power and energy efficiency behind the Western Digital 2TB GP Green Disc.  This really amazed us all as it romped on home, know this surprised us with its versatility and utter power at which it came to the fore as a stand alone mass storage king.   Rumours soon where flying about that there was to be an enterprise variant looming upon the horizon and it would be very fast indeed with a few extra add-ons - like two onboard processing units with 64mb of cache (this is covered below).

RE2 variant of this green family has been around a while and its been anticipated for a while that its successor would not be far away.  When the briefing arrived it caught us fully off guard at what we were to see.  The drives arrived from Western Digital we were flabbergasted to the size and weight bringing them into a similar sequence of the WD 2TB GP drive we reviewed back in January.  This was most pleasing indeed.

The design of a disc at this magnitude is aimed squarely at the enterprise end user that stores masses amounts of data in differing raid arrays of all formats.   The thirst for bigger drives to cut back in some areas of smaller drive components or, increase capacity has been a huge demand since the advent of the 1TB drive.  Enterprise needs wanted these magical 2TB drives.   These discs now will most certainly satisfy all those thirsty requirements listed.   Video streaming and monitoring, file storage the list itself is endless of the capabilities.   Some files used within the professional graphics arena can be easily in excess of 2GB and as recently demonstrated some Photoshop files in excess of 750MB's.  Therefore the need for good high-end storage is in demand and Western Digital has been to fore in providing a sound eco-friendly solution.

When the 1TB drives became available last year we forecasted that the standard system of the workstation and SoHo users would have as a slave disc of data storage the 1TB disc.  This fact has been well borne out as many good OEM's and System builders have followed this route.  Taking into consideration the actual cost per MB of a 1TB hard disc has dropped so greatly it makes sound logical sense.  Will this see the advent of the 2TB disc being a slave disc by the year end, time will tell.

Massive hard discs of this nature now are being vogue with many end users and the demand for reviews with the discs in as powerful systems possible is the request of the day.   With professional graphic’s applications producing huge files and demanding more disc space, it’s critical that the correct systems show the right hard discs, as there are some instances conflicts.   Here with showing exclusive first outings of the new professional graphic cards, it’s critical that the whole system I/O performs flawlessly.   Therefore with each new outing, you the reader knows, what is seen here – works.

Before we go on any further with the dialogue let’s have a few pictures to grasp the fantastic engineering that has gone into this most powerful but "green" beast to venture out from their prestigious stable.

Key Features of the WD 2TB RE4-GP™ Enterprise SATA Hard Disc (Our Thanks to Western Digital PR for the information supplied here)

Cooler. Quieter. Eco-friendlier.

Page 1 - Introduction
Page 2 - Introduction Continued
Page 3 - System Set-Up
Page 4 - Single Drive Results
Page 5 - Raid 1 Results
Page 6 - File Transfer Results
Page 7 - Conclusions and Award