Western Digital 500GB RE2

by Rob Williams on August 14, 2006 in Hard Drives

Are you looking for huge storage that won’t hurt the pocketbook? Easily done, since the 500GB RE2 drive we are looking at today retails for around $250. Does it have the performance you are looking for?

Benchmarking Methodology, HD Tach/Tune

Throughout all of our benchmarks regardless of what we are reviewing, testing is done in a clean and stand-alone version of Windows XP Professional with SP2. Prior to testing, these conditions are met:

Desktop and scrap files are cleaned up, including emptying of recycle bin.
No virus scanner or firewall is installed in the stand-alone installation.
The stand-alone installation drive is completely defragged using Diskeeper 10 Pro Premier.
All unnecessary programs are closed, so that Windows should have no more than 15 active processes running.
Computer has proper airflow.

If you are interested in using the same benchmarks as us, feel free to visit the developers website:

The testing rig used for today’s benchmarking is as follows:

CPU: AMD Windsor 4600+ EE @ 2.4GHz
Motherboard: ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (603 BIOS)
Memory: OCZ 2GB PC2-7200 EPP
Video: BFG 6800GT OC 256MB PCI-E
Sound: Onboard HD Audio
Storage: Western Digital 500GB RE2
Etcetera: Windows XP Professional w/ SP2, NVIDIA 81.98 Drivers
Cooling: Corsair Nautilus 500

Note: You can read the review of the Seagate 500GB here, for all the info regarding it, including specs. Like the WD RE2, it also is 7200RPM, 16MB Cache.

HD Tach RW3

HD Tach is one of my personal favorite tools for testing out storage solutions. It can perform tests on an 8MB, 32MB and Extended level, and spit out reliable info such as Average speeds and latencies.

It doesn’t look like any other hard drive is going to be able to touch Seagates Burst speed anytime soon. Thankfully, that’s not the truly important result here. Rather, the Average MB/s is, and we can see that our WD drive cleaned up here. It proved almost 10MB/s faster than the Seagate on average, which I found quite surprising.