This particular drive was found in a discarded server, which is not unusual as it is a “RAID Edition” drive intended for server usage but sold via the regular computer stores. It claimed a higher reliability with longer MBTF and RAID specific functionality, while some other products of a similar vein claimed different firmware or longer qualification periods to ensure reliability. That being said, I never had any issues with a Caviar SE in a serving environment either …
The Drive
Externally, the WD Caviar RE16 appears practically identical to the WD Caviar SE series drives, being built around the same case. The difference, however, is that this drive is SATA capable and is claimed to be more reliable with RAID-specific functionality (e.g. TLER). This seems to be the beginning of hard drive application-based differentiation within the consumer space, which has continued on into today. It also comes with double the amount of cache – 16MiB.
The underside of the drive also looks like most of the later Caviar SEs with the reduced size PCB.
Being an early SATA drive, this one comes with the Western Digital FlexPower arrangement which allows the drive to be powered via the regular 4-pin Molex connection instead of a SATA power connector. Use of both connectors could, however, result in drive damage and is not advisable.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
The drive has done an impressive number of hours, but still reports itself to be healthy, running firmware 10.02E01.
HD Tune
While there is a slight disturbance in the write profile especially towards the outer zone, it seems the drive has retained its full performance, averaging 50.4MB/s which is a reasonable figure for 2005.
The I/O performance is fairly consistent, with the buffer paying big dividends especially in the extra tests on reading.
CrystalDiskMark
The CDM results seem to agree that the drive is a decent performer, although at this time, it seems the SATA controller has limited benefit from NCQ.
ATTO
Full I/O performance is attained by 16kB accesses, although writes at even 4kB approach the full performance. The drive seems to be tuned towards write I/Os.