Of two (now three) RE3s, I had one go bad within a couple days. But I don't mind that much so long as the MTBF of the survivors stays high.

You're measuring dbA at 1" (inch)? Is that open air or hard mounted? Same mounting for all testees?

Anecdotal, sure, but in my experience the RE3 is one quietest drives I've ever deployed. At least as quiet as some older Hitachi "low noise" drives I've used. I can't hear them above <20 dB case fans.

Of two (now three) RE3s, I had one go bad within a couple days. But I don't mind that much so long as the MTBF of the survivors stays high.

You're measuring dB at 1" (inch)? Is that open air or hard mounted? Same mounting for all testees?

Anecdotal, sure, but in my experience the RE3 is one quietest drives I've ever deployed. At least as quiet as some older Hitachi "low noise" drives I've used. I can't hear them above <20 dB case fans.

Scott or Geoff, when are you going to have a review of the Seagate 1.5TB? I can only find one 'pro' review but it was really poor with very few tests and no power draw or noise measurements.

Hopefully these hold up better than the RE2. The RE2 has a horrendous DOA rate. I am a WD fan but the RE2 made me question the direction WD is going in right now.

Are you able to measure peak power consumption during disk spin-up?

Also, when do you start timing the boot process? It would be interesting if the RE3 is spinning up slower than the Black in order to reduce peak power consumption (it becomes big deal when you have eight of these things hanging off a single power supply, and they all decide to draw 35W at the same time).

I'm curious as to how well these drives perform in a RAID array compared to the desktop counterparts.

WD's 1TB GP and RE2-GP are fixed 5400rpm. Please fix those spec charts!

An observation on WD 5 year warranty .
WD would not honour the warranty on a drive that failed when the vendor I purchased from went out of business so make sure you purchase from an established company that looks as if it will still be around in 5 years

It's nice to see you concern a big deal to confuse people with so called Caviar SE16 while on the official site this drive is specified into Caviar Blue series

Nice review but it be better to show some other benchies than win & doom3 load, it not unimportant but these few seconds on the action we do once a day or less, are really irrelevant. Or some weird test from ipeak that are questionable by itself cause they're synthetic and therefore easy to be manipulated, ntm that some actions combined in those tests really some of never/rarely used in real life on workstatons. and IOmeter is more reliable representation of server workload than ipeak (if that was the intention)

Got 4 of these drives in 2 comps in a RAID 1 array on both systems. Very fast performers, and really I don't notice any noise from them. they are cool and quiet. RAID 1 Intel ICH9R, and MD array in a linux box.

Replaced 2 seagate ES2's, and the performance gain was phenominal.

I am really impressed with these drives, even though the cover isn't flush on the top, I thought it looked really cheesey, but the proof is in the performance and durability and they have it (so far).

Enterprise storage gets most of its performance from having lots of drives and distributing the storage loads across those drives. I am not sure if disk level multi-io tasking optimization makes a difference. Maybe its better to have fast drives with larges caches and good sequential performance and let the file system and the raid controller sort out how to queue requests to the drives. It would be great if tech-report could test several drives in a raid setup. Obviously benchmarking would be difficult, probably why there are no good ones on the web. I just bought 6 x 1TB caviar black drives with an areca ARC 1260 for work. If anybody can suggest some good benchmarks let me know. The most powerful one I could get my hands on was Flexible I/O

http://freshmeat.net/projects/fio/

Using this I can create most types of io patterns.

Weird, a review of an RE drive in non-raid...

It seems that previous RE's had a bit more of a lead compared to the consumer varieties than this one does. I guess the consumer one's are just catching up.