Western Digital RE3 WD2502ABYS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: HD Tune 2.55 RAID 1 // single Min 63.0 MB/s // 60.9MB/s Max 113.0 MB/s // 113.0MB/s Average: 105.2MB/s // 93.3MB/s Access time 9.2ms // 12.0ms Burst 136.5MB/s // 124.3MB/s HD TACH 3.0.4.0 RAID1 Random Access: 9.7ms Average read: 112.4 MB/s Burst: 222.9 MB/s

Cons: follow up in a year

Overall Review: Intel G33, Q6600 @ 3.0Ghz, 4(2x2GB) DDR2 800 Win Server 2003 SP2

Pros: Can I go to 6 or 7 eggs please? I've used hundreds upon hundreds of these drives. They're such an improvement over the 2500YS drives (RE2 series, predecessor to this drive). Don't let the weight of these drives fool you (them being light = big plus)... these are extremely *SOLID* drives. I personally installed 2 of them in a RAID1 (seriously, better safe than sorry!) on my home machine and haven't had a single issue with either one of them. I've used *cases* of these things at work and the failure rate is way lower than other similar-spec drives. I refuse to use anything else (when I can get away with it) as primary drives in any of my systems. Outside of work I've built at least 12 Shuttle PCs with these as the primary drive. Not a *single* failure from any of those systems (8+ months of uptime).

Cons: Absolutely *none*

Overall Review: If you're wanting to cut weight of the system down and want something *EXTREMELY RELIABLE* then these are the drives to get. Warranty is awesome (but not normally needed) and the reliability of these things is awesome. Yeah, they're about 1/8th the weight of a "normal" drive, but who cares? They run cooler, they run quieter, they're lighter and they're rock solid. Hands down the top 250G drive available these days.

Pros: It's faster than the original RE drive and quiet.

Cons: None

Overall Review: I had always used WD drives up until about a year and half ago when I ordered a WD SE drive and it died in 3 months. I then decided to give SGate drives another try. Since then, I have been through 3 SGate drives and they tend to last about 6 months before errors begin. WD drives have always been very reliable although slower than other HD's, but that appears to have changed. I did some reasearch on this drive and found that it is basically an enhanced version of the WD Black series HD. The RE3 and the Black series are side by side in test results except for boot up times and in Raid configurations. The RE3 is designed for Raid but not for boot up times since these drives are used in servers and servers are not rebooted often, but the difference is only 12 seconds. But in a Raid configuration, this HD is faster than the Black series. If you are not going to use this in a Raid config, then the Black series is a better choice.Great HD at a great price.

Pros: Works, quiet, reasonably cheap, from Newegg, free shipping, 5 year warranty.

Cons: Can't think of any.

Overall Review: When I went to Windows 7 64 bit, I decided to save the XP Pro disk for safety. After a full year, I had only used about 60 Gb of the 500, so I went smaller with this, just got a longer warranty.

Pros: These drives are designed for RAID. I've got 4 of these in RAID 0 (w/ rubber mounts). Wow, sequential write @ 299 MBytes per Second. Sequential read 378 MBytes per Second. 5 Year! Very stable with ASUS P5Q3 MB.

Cons: Should have smaller RE3 drives, don't need so much capacity. N/G for non-RAID (read WD specs). Cache: 16MB (I'm not sure if this is a con) vs Cache: 32MB

Overall Review: Big press on the new solid state drives. For way less you get faster writes and reads and way more space. My 4 @ 250GB RAID 0 are faster than 2-3 of those 'new' drives. With 2 more RE3's I'd probably be writing at 450 MBytes. Yes you've got to have back ups, however processing large amounts of data and writing to the disk is a breeze. Best to use smaller drives with single platter (250GB or 350 GB).

Pros: Light weight, quiet, works great in RAID setups (I'm using onboard ICH10R on a EP45-UD3R Board from Gigabyte.) I've used probably 200 of these drives @ home and @ work and they have a low failure rate.

Cons: Higher priced because they are "Enterprise" class drives. Of course, you pay for what you get. The higher price means longer/better warranty.

Pros: Bought two of them, and they're running very well in a RAID0 config. Fast, quiet.

Cons: n/a

Overall Review: Motherboard is P5K-Deluxe (ICH9R Raid Controller)

Pros: Very quiet and very fast. Single platter. Made for RAID. Newegg has stepped up their shipping practice on drives as I bought four of these and they came in part of a foam hard drive support that was probably sent to them in a ten pack format. Perfect. Four drives reports 935mb.

Cons: None, no errors reported.

Overall Review: ATTO Becnhmark, 4 drives in RAID 0: All reads/writes over over 2mb = 320mb/sec Max READ = 402mb/sec - Max WRITE = 389mb/sec Supercache 4.0 reads these at over 4gb/sec.. Yes, 4GB/sec (EVGA Classified 3 770 ICH10R)