Western Digital RE4 1TB SATA Enterprise HDD

With hard drives not being a big focus at Phoronix, the comparison of disk drives to which the RE4 was compared is limited and the comparison drives were used as reference points rather than being direct competition to this enterprise-class SATA HDD. However, thanks to OpenBenchmarking.org, it's very easy and valuable to compare the disk performance tests in this article to your own system. With the Phoronix Test Suite installed it's simply a matter of running phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1303116-FO-HDDSSDUBU52.

The comparison drives included:

Western Digital WD5000AZRX: A 500GB "Green Caviar" drive featuring 64MB of cache, SATA 6.0GB/s interface, and IntelliPower technology. This isn't an enterprise-class HDD but rather is focused for low-power storage.

Seagate ST3320620AS: A Seagate Barracuda SATA HD with 320GB of storage, 7200RPM spin, and 16MB cache.

OCZ Solid 2: For a solid-state drive reference point, a 64GB OCZ Solid 2 SSD with 64MB of cache with Serial ATA 2.0 interface was used.

Seagate ST980811AS: An old Seagate Momentus laptop hard drive with 80GB of storage, 5400RPM spin, SATA 1.5 GB/s interface, and 8MB of cache was used.

The Phoronix Test Suite key information on the system:

With all of that said, on the following pages are these benchmark results for the Western Digital RE4 Enterprise 1TB hard drive against these other SATA drives. Overall, the performance was in line with expectations when factoring in the differences between five tested disk drives under Ubuntu Linux with EXT4 and the Linux 3.8 kernel.