When WD introduced its updated ‘Re’ line in 2013, it gave the enterprise market a brand-new high-end option – one that offered lots of storage and lots of reliability. When I took at look at the 4TB model, I was left thoroughly impressed – enough to award the drive an Editor’s Choice award.
So what does WD have up its sleeve now? An Re extension series called Re+, one that follows the same goal-set as Re, but offers industry-leading power efficiency – 4.6W at idle, and 6.2W during sequential writes.
While the Re series supports three densities – 4, 5, and 6TB – the Re+ sticks to just 5 and 6TB. It’ll probably strike no one as a surprise to learn that the Re+ series is a bit slower than the Re series – it’s a matter of 7200 RPM vs. 5760 RPM – but the differences are not that large. The Re 6TB peaks at 225MB/s, while the Re+ 6TB drops to 175MB/s. Unfortunately, seek times for neither Re series is given, but we’d expect similar drops to occur (eg: 12ms to 15ms-ish).
After poring over the featureset of both the Re and Re+ series, it’s hard to tell if the Re+ has a different design than the Re – aside from whatever’s required to moderate the disk speed. Either way, for those needing a very reliable large-density solution but don’t need to hit the performance ceiling on such drives, the Re+ series looks to fill that void.