Western Digital WD2500YD: Enterprise on the Desktop
by Gary Key on June 24, 2006 10:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
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.
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.
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11 Comments
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driveguy - Monday, June 26, 2006 - link
I do not understand why the YD family was reviewed so late in it's life.The YS familily has been introduced from 160-500GB on a common platform.
It would make much more sense to review the current product.
Gary Key - Monday, June 26, 2006 - link
We reviewed the recent product life update to the YD family that changed it to the RE16 family with 16MB cache and 3GB/s SATA support. The YS family (160GB~320GB range) just started shipping in volume earlier this month and samples are arriving shortly in the 160GB and 250GB sizes. We received the 320GB YS today that will be tested against the other 320GB drives from Western Digital and Seagate in the near future. Thank you for the comments.
driveguy - Tuesday, June 27, 2006 - link
Hi Gary,Thank you for your response.
YS goes from 160GB to 500GB. The real attraction for the RE products is reliability more than performance. This is really not something you can review because you will not have access to field failure rates but these drives have done quite well in high duty cycle envirements. They have crushed STX NL models in the market with the absolute lion's share of this market.
Gary Key - Wednesday, June 28, 2006 - link
Hi,I could have been a little clearer in my 160GB~320GB statement, my point was those drive sizes just started shipping in volume this month. The 400GB and 500GB drives were shipping in May although we have not received the 400GB sample yet. I think with the YS series WD has brought the nearline performance up to and at times exceeding the SE16 line now. I think it will be interesting comparing the NL35.2 to the WD YS series since both are new product releases. We are implementing a 16 drive RAID chassis for enterprise/benchmark testing shortly so we should be able to look at some failure rate information this time next year in this market segment.
Thanks...
Squidward - Monday, June 26, 2006 - link
By looking at this article and others I've seen the Raptor is hands down the best drive you can get without going into SCSI drives. How does that apply to real usage, is the difference that notable versus the other drives in this article? I've been considering buying one if the difference is truly noticable, particularly as it applies to game loading times and recording tv programs.tallman45 - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
Nice job as always with the review.A more valuable comparison IMHO though would have been like cost competitors such as the new 74GB 16mb cache Raptor and the 7200.10 320gb Seagate. It stands to reason that a $300 150GB Raptor had better outperform a $90 250gb YD
Gary Key - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
Hi,We have the new 74GB 16MB cache Raptor arriving in about 10 days. We have completed our testing on the Seagate 320GB 7200.10 and are in the process of completing several other 200GB~320GB drives for a desktop roundup shortly in what we believe is the best price to performance range at this time. Our 500GB roundup and PVR article will be available in late July. As stated in the article we will also do a separate review on RAID performance with both nearline enterprise and desktop drives in the near future. The process of adding additional multi-tasking benchmarks along with doing both hardware (Areca) RAID and soft (nF500) RAID is painstakingly slow. ;->
The other process we have setup is an additional test bench that is currently running previously reviewed drives 24/7 with varying stress tests so we can start reporting on reliability and doing a quick follow-up on the drives performance every few months. In about two weeks, you should start seeing storage articles from us about every 10 days.
Thank you for the comments.
Gary Key - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
Where is the edit button? :) I meant to end my reply with "storage reviews from us about every 10 days or less."dhei - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
150gig raptor is around $200 now...dhei - Saturday, June 24, 2006 - link
forgot to add the 75gig Raptor is only $130. In terms of pure performance most people would go for the little premium in price for Raptor than more hd space. They just get a 200+gig drive for backup and install main apps on raptor.