Western Digital WD2500YD: Enterprise on the Desktop

Final Words

The performance of the new Western Digital RE16 series on the desktop is certainly competitive with the other desktop units in our tests. This does not come as a surprise given the recent improvements in the drive design and firmware compared to the previous generation product. However, it is obvious that when comparing the WD2500YD to its performance oriented and Raptor technology based RE2 counterparts that Western Digital is correct in marketing this drive as an entry level nearline enterprise product. This is not a knock against the drive; it's just that the RE2 and Raptor perform significantly better in most of the benchmarks, as they should.

While the drives are specifically designed for RAID server applications such as video surveillance, enterprise backup, document management, scientific computing, and audio/video applications, we found the drive to be at home on the desktop in a single drive configuration as well. The overall performance results as a single drive were very good, and in our preliminary RAID testing (we'll cover this more in our next article) it excels considering a price of $.33 per gigabyte. As the RE2 WD5000YS currently costs $.51 per gigabyte and the RE2 WD4000YR costs $.43 per gigabyte, the WD2500YD is a bargain in its price class.


Throughout our intensive test schedule that has netted over 220 hours of drive testing, we did not find or experience any quality issues with this drive. While we did not experience any TLER related errors in our non-RAID tests, the possibility exists that a recoverable error could be marked as unrecoverable. However, we feel like if an error is not recovered within seven seconds then it probably is a true error and should be marked as such. It is still Western Digital's recommendation that you purchase the SE16 drive for general desktop usage although we find the RE16 to be a better overall value from a feature viewpoint. We will see shortly if it is also a better choice from a performance perspective.

We found this drive to be one of the quietest drives we have tested and found the seek requests to be very muted and generally unobtrusive during our testing with a near silent system. Once we turned on the case fans, the drive could not be heard. The drive runs surprisingly cool without air circulation around it and even cooler with it. We would not hesitate to operate this drive on a 24/7 basis in an HTPC or SFF case.

What is our recommendation? If the storage capacity of this drive is acceptable and you need an extremely reliable drive for your SFF setup then this drive offers the features and performance you need. If want to run two or more of these drives in a RAID 0/1 or higher array in an HTPC application then it would be a perfect fit considering the low cost of the drive matched with 24/7 operation capability. Overall, the WD2500YD drive is a very good effort from Western Digital. We will see how it matches up to the direct competition in the near future.