Review on 💯 Reliable and High-Performance Western Digital WD2001FASS 2 TB Caviar Black Desktop Hard Drive with 3GB/s SATA Interface and 7200 RPM by Kevin Witherspoon

Other reviewers went into great detail about ease of use, what's included, how to set it up, and discussed the various benefits of Western Digital's reliability and customer service... so I don't see a need to repeat my thoughts and opinions on these issues. I bought these drives to add more storage to my home office media server (Dell PowerEdge, 3.0GHz HT, 2GB DDR2 RAM, PCI/e SATA II RAID controller). Before choosing my final RAID configuration, I ran extensive tests on these drives to determine read performance (writes aren't a big issue when streaming videos and music to different locations), and here are the results of those tests. The "control" group were two 360GB green WD PowerEdge drives configured in RAID 1 (disk mirroring) (the OS drive is a pair of 10GB EIDE drives in RAID 1). These results are the average of four runs with HD Tune.Control: RAID/Space/Max Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU1 / 360GB / 99.6 / 76 / 2.1% 1 TB WD Black DrivesRAID/Space /Max. Read (MB/s)/AVG Read (MB/s)/CPU0 / 4TB / 205.3 /168.8 / 6.1%1 / 2TB / 108.6 / 86.3 / 2.9%0-1 / 2TB / 207.3 / 168.6 / 6.5%5 / 3TB / 233.0 / 205.9 / 8.6% Apples-to-Apples comparison in a RAID configuration 1 1TB WD Black Drives are significantly faster than the smaller Green drives. I was quite surprised that the RAID 5 configuration turned out to be much faster than the RAID 0-1 configuration and in the end I chose the RAID5 configuration as it gave me the best value for money (reliability , speed and available disk space). . ). Before implementing RAID5 with these drives on the server, the average data transfer rate from WD Green drives to my laptop through an 802.11g router was 1.8 MB/s (this has been tested with large audio and media files). With the same router, I'm now seeing 4.6MB/s (about 42Mbps), which is close enough to the router's theoretical 54MB limit that I suspect the reason it's not faster is up is due to router limitations. Wired tests (connecting the laptop to the router's 100 megabit ports using a network cable) confirm this, as the transfer rate increased from 1.9 MB/s to 10.3 MB/s.