CrazyMonkeyTM
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When we looked at Western Digital's "GreenPower" Caviar GP last month, we heralded the drive's low noise levels and frugal power consumption. Given the GP's slower spindle speed and energy-efficient billing, those results were largely expected. What surprised us, however, was how well the GreenPower Caviar handled demanding multi-user loads. It's not often that you find low power consumption with strong performance riding shotgun.
That combination makes the GreenPower drives particularly enticing for enterprise environments looking to maximize storage capacity within a limited power budget. Don't think that potential went unnoticed at Western Digital. The company has been massaging the GP to better suit enterprise applications, and the result of those efforts is the new RE2-GP.
As one might expect, the RE2-GP has much in common with the Caviar GP. However, the RE2 packs a few additional perks, including a longer warranty, optimization for RAID environments, and firmware tweaks that aim to deliver better performance with enterprise-class applications. Read on to see how those firmware tweaks affect the GreenPower's performance and why this drive might be a slam-dunk for enterprise storage.
Tweaked for enterprise
"IntelliPower" lies at the core of the GreenPower line, a marketing name that signifies a delicate balance of transfer rate, cache size, and spindle speed that ensures low power consumption along with what Western Digital calls "solid" performance. Two of the RE2-GP's IntelliPower key specs are easy to pin down: the drive has 16MB of cache, and its spec sheet boasts sustained transfer rates of 672Mbps, or 84MB/s. However, the third and arguably most important element—spindle speed—remains shrouded in mystery.
Western Digital won't reveal the exact spindle speed of its GreenPower drives, saying only that they run somewhere between 5,400 and 7,200 RPM. Spindle speeds vary depending on capacities, too, although all GP drives at a given capacity run at the same speed. We've also confirmed that RE2-GP drives share the same spindle speeds as their like-capacity Caviar GP counterparts.
Direccionado para as empresas e com um preço a rondar os $350...
In: The Tech Report
