Always-On Enterprise SATA Storage

Written by John Martinez

alwaysonsata

Western Digital WD1002FBYS RE3 1TB SATA Hard Drive: $159

www.wdc.com

COMMON CONVENTION DICTATES THAT YOU USE SAS storage in situations where performance, availability, and expanded connectivity are of the utmost importance, while SATA gives you lots of capacity and low cost per gigabyte. But mixing and matching storage isn’t always so black and white. Hard drive vendors offer higher-capacity SAS disks, while improving the reliability and performance of their SATA solutions.

Backed by an impressive list of specifications, Western Digital’s RE3 is designed specifically for server and enterprise storage applications. One terabyte of capacity and 32MB of data cache might be common in the desktop world, but those are big numbers for always-on, high-availability disks. WD buffs the RE3 up with its fourth-generation RAFF technology and RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery. The first feature monitors the drive, correcting linear and rotational vibration, yielding a 60% performance increase in high-vibration environments (such as racks). The second prevents RAID fallout caused by the normal error-recovery process of desktop drives. The RE3’s performance is further bolstered by a second onboard processor, upping performance another 20%.