Manufactured and optimized for enterprise applications, WD Caviar RE SATA 1.5 Gb/s drives offer enterprise-specific features that make them exceptionally reliable for high-capacity nearline storage applications.
Key Features
- RAID-specific time-limited error recovery improves compatibility with RAID adapters, and prevents drive fallout caused by the extended hard drive error-recovery processes common to desktop hard drives.
- 1 million hours MTBF meets enterprise-class reliability standards, backed by an industry-leading five-year warranty.
- 16 MB cache and 1.5 Gb/s data transfer rate
Ideal for
- Servers
- Network attached storage
- Scientific computing
- Life sciences
- Video surveillance
- Enterprise backup
- Document/image management
- Audio/video media applications
- Other demanding write-intensive applications
- Note: For high performance desktop applications, consider WD Caviar SE16 drives.
Frequently Asked Questions
| Q: | Regular 7200 RPM desktop drives run fine in RAID environments; why do I need these drives? |
| A: | Unlike regular desktop drives, WD Caviar RE EIDE and SATA hard drives are engineered and manufactured to enterprise-class standards and include features such as time-limited error recovery that make them an ideal solution for RAID. |
| Q: | What is time-limited error recovery and why do I need it? |
| A: | Desktop drives are designed to protect and recover data, at times pausing for as much as a few minutes to make sure that data is recovered. Inside a RAID system, where the RAID controller handles error recovery, the drive neednt pause for extended periods to recover data. In fact, heroic error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array. WD Caviar RE is engineered to prevent hard drive error recovery fallout by limiting the drives error recovery time. With error recovery factory set to seven seconds, the drive has time to attempt a recovery, allow the RAID controller to log the error, and still stay online. |
| Q: | I need A/V (audio/video) extensions. |
| A: | A/V extensions offered by some competitors are relics of a time when hard drives were much slower and required extensive error handling logic when overwhelmed by the application. Todays much faster hard drives make these extensions unnecessary. We urge you to test WD Caviar RE in your A/V environment. |
| Q: | Will these products work with my existing power supply? |
| A: | The WD Caviar RE SATA drive has the new 15-pin SATA power as well as the legacy 4-pin power connectors. (Do not connect both connectors at the same time.) The WD Caviar RE EIDE drives use the industry-standard 4-pin power connector. |
| Q: | What about SATA connections? Is the drive hot pluggable? |
| A: | The WD Caviar RE SATA works with latching SATA cables, non-latching SATA cables and SecureConnect™. SecureConnect is available only for WD SATA drives and provides additional structural support where the SATA cable connects to the hard drive. The WD Caviar RE drive is compatible with SATA backplanes and SATA hard drive carriers and, in those environments, is hot pluggable. |
| Q: | For RAID environments I need SCSI data integrity. |
| A: | The Serial ATA version includes 32-bit CRC error checking for all bits transmitted: command, data, and status. And, both SATA and EIDE versions include error checking to compare the data read back from the hard drive tob the data originally written to the hard drive. |
