WD WD2500YS-01SHB1 RE (3.5″ 250GB 2007)

This drive was pulled from the same server where the Caviar RE16 drive was found, suggesting that perhaps a Caviar RE had failed and been replaced with this drive, that drops the Caviar name entirely.

The Drive

This drive uses a new label and lid similar in design to that used on the AAKS series drives.

The underside, however, seems to be a more traditional casting similar to the Caviar SE drives.

This drive retains the flexpower arrangement, which would soon be eliminated as Serial ATA power and interfaces begin to become mainstream.

Performance Tests

CrystalDiskInfo

This drive has done a decent amount of hours, but still reports itself as healthy. As with other RE drives, it has a capacious 16MiB buffer. This drive has firmware 20.06C06.

HD Tune

Throughput graphs are nice and clean with the exception of writes in the outer zone, averaging a throughput of 53MB/s.

Random I/O performance is very smooth on this drive, with minimal of delays, and the cache shows big benefits in reading with smaller benefits on write in the extra tests.

CrystalDiskMark

The tests done by CDM demonstrate similar levels of throughput, with NCQ seeming to dramatically increase small block read performance.

ATTO

Full I/O performance is reached by about 8kB accesses, with a very balanced mix of read and write.