Customer Reviews

Western Digital 1 TB RE3 SATA 3 Gb/s 7200 RPM 32 MB Cache Bulk/OEM Enterprise Hard Drive - WD1002FBYS

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought 5 units of the 1T RE3 drive for a RAID-5 set. Works great. Less heat than the black drives it replaced. The RE3 is better suited to RAID applications than standard drives which can drop off the raid set unexpectedly.

So, I bought 3 of these recently for a RAID-0 in my Tyan S2915-E MoBo, and I would constantly keep getting errors in Nvidia Mediashied saying that the array was going to fail soon. Long story short, the problem was from both ends, the NVidia driver on XP X64 and one of the disks being bad. one think I'll tell right now is that You absolutely must run the WD test utility to ensure the health of the drives as soon as you recieve them to avoid any confusion. There was a point when I thought my Mobo was bad. Amazon was super cool for sending me a replacement without even waiting for me to send in my faulty drive unit. Performace is definitely great as I am running all three as a 3-way striped RAID-0 Array. To rate these drives as a single drive is useless, for that you have the black edition drives anyway. the RE3 is for RAID and I think rating their RAID performance should be the only performance review.

These drives are just over-priced Caviar Black drives. Unfortunately, you must pay the extra sixty bucks if you need RAID capable drives. WD has disabled TLER on the Caviars that is required in a RAID environment. If you don't plan on setting up an array, don't waste your money on these. Up until late last year Caviars supported TLER by a software switch but I guess WD needed a gimmick to make more money without actually doing anything.

I read complaints about packaging. I bought two of these. Both were suspended in cusioned cradles in separate boxes placed together into another. They were well, if not over, protected.

Got two of this drives, stripped in RAID 0 for higher performances using Photoshop and Lightroom.
It's blazing fast once correctly partionned (keep in mind the scratch size can become quite large when dealing with larges/many files on CS4)

I recommend you read DIGGLOYD's blog (http://macperformanceguide.com/Storage-Drive-WesternDigitalRE3.html) before purchasing so that you know what you'll be dealing with.

I have two of these in a RAID 1 configuration and when one failed, I had no difficulty whatsoever with getting a replacement from westerndigital.

I have seen some comments about why RE class. From the WD website:

Upgrading from Blue to Black gets you
Dual processor, dual actuator, bigger cache, StableTrac and 5 Year Ltd Warranty

In addition to the above, upgrading from Black to RE gets you
RAFF (for high vibration environments), IntelliSeek, Multi-axis shock sensor, RAID-specific time-limited error recovery (TLER), Third generation dynamic fly height for improved reliability, and a stated MTBF of 1.2 million hours at 100% duty cycle (MTBF is never mentioned for the "desktop" line)

Over the past 20+ years I have had far too many hard drives fail and decided that a little extra money was worth the lowered probability of having to deal with it.

Have had several HD failures over recent past. Spoke to many about this and they have experienced the same thing. Solution I kept hearing was get enterprise HD. So am giving this a try and at least for now I am pleased with it.

This 1 TB hard drive performs like all other Western Digital hard drives that I've purchased in the past: Excellent! The 32MB of embedded buffer, along with it's capacity, speed, and reliability -- clearly made it a valuable upgrade. This hard drive also spins very quietly.

The original hard drive in my HP EX485 MediaSmart server was nearly full and I wanted to add an additional drive in one of the remaining bays. After reading online information and after a short discussion with a Western Digital representative, I decided that a Western Digital RE3 series drive would meet my needs for a fast and robust internal hard drive.
The drive arrived quickly and in excellent shape. The installation in the server was easy. The drive has been working correctly in the server for several weeks.

I purchased 5 of these for a RAID5 setup and wow, they are speedy and they don't make as much noise as I thought they would from reviews on these drives. So far I am impressed.

Perfect drives very fast, I bought 2 of these 2 years ago. I edit a lot of video / pictures. I never had any problems. Great warranty 5y.