White Label WD RE4? Velociraptor?

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Jeggs101

Jeggs101

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Dec 29, 2010
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PigLover

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They are all listed as SATA-2 drives. RE4s have been shipping as SATA-3 for well over two years. Whatever they are, B-Stock or refurbs or whatever - they are really old.
 
Jeggs101

Jeggs101

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Can RE4's do over 300 megs/sec? I didn't think sata 3 mattered
 
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PigLover

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Jeggs101 said:
Can RE4's do over 300 megs/sec? I didn't think sata 3 mattered
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It doesn't matter a lot. My comment was more related to source/age of the drives. Wherever they are coming from they are at least two years old, most likely refurbs coming out of their warranty contractors back door. Not that this is good or bad - if you are OK working with White Label then you are probably OK with this part too.

As for the speeds: RE4s usually carry a large cache. If you are doing large sequential reads/writes then the difference between 300MB/s and 600MB/s makes little difference for a spinny disk, but there are workloads that hit the cache a lot harder and you can see a very large difference in IOPs on the SATA3 vs SATA2 interface.
 
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PigLover

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With last year's floods affecting the major disk drive parts factory region? No - I wouldn't touch them. Its like getting a good deal on a "like new" car in NJ next spring or in the Gulf region after Katrina. Too much risk that this is flood damage product to be worth it.
 
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sakumisan

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Jan 11, 2013
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PigLover said:
It doesn't matter a lot. My comment was more related to source/age of the drives.
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If you visit Western Digital's website you'll find that RE4s are only offered with SATA-III at 2GB or above. There is a SATA-II and a SATA-III 2GB RE4, but absolutely no SATA-III 1GB RE4.

White label drives have been repaired by a third party, and resold. The ones listed are actually RE4s that were refurbished. This doesn't really place them at two years old, as per your assumption, but definitely means they are not the same as buying a brand new drive by any means. I chose to use the exact drives he was referring to for a home server build, but I'd never run something like that in a production environment. You would probably have to replace drives and rebuild arrays too often, but I have had no problems personally with 3 of the 1TB White Label RE4s in a RAID 5 array.

I guess it all depends on what you want to use them for; I'd have no problems throwing them in my test servers.
 
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