Western Digital have now joined the ranks of Hitachi, Maxtor and Seagate in offering a 500GB drive to the general public. We’re reasonably uncomfortable with drive sizes this large with no form of redundancy – and with the TB marker only a few months away, we wouldn’t mind if someone started building redundancy into single drive packages.

Rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF (that’s 137 years. Seriously people, when has a hard drive ever lasted that long?), it also features such world class acronyms as RAFF (Rotary Acceleration Feed Forward) and TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) – easing the pain of drive dropouts from arrays and increasing vibration tolerance from neighbouring drives respectively.

Using the now commonplace SATA 3Gb/s interface, the drive nonetheless still has a legacy molex power connector, for those who may be running servers with older power supplies, or are just a little bit behind the times.
Hooking the black beauty up to our standard test bench, we racked the Caviar RE2 up with the Seagate 7200.9 500GB and Western Digital ADFD 150GB Raptor in a 32MB HDTach long test to see where it stood.

The results speak for themselves, with the burst speeds for the RE2, 7200.9 and ADFD being 194.4, 247.6 and 137MB/s respectively, and the average read speeds being 61.9, 51.2 and 75.4MB/s, placing WD’s 500GB solution nicely near the top in the sustained speed stakes.

If you’re comfortable in using such a large drive without freaking out about data loss, or need a behemoth to base your bastion of RAIDed hard drives on, you could do worse than grabbing yourself an RE2.