SG Broadband Community

I have the following 2 drives. When I run a disk performance benchmark on them they seem to perform as expected. Both drives are approximately 3 to 4 years old.

500 gig - WDC WD5001AALS-00E3A0
640 gig - WDC WD6401AALS-00L382

A couple of days ago I installed another drive that was salvaged out of one of our servers. It seems to run without a problem but when I run the same benchmarking programs I'm only getting about 60% of the performance that I get from the other 2. I know the manufacture date on this one is about 2-3 years older but I didn't think (or know) that might make a difference. I did research this model and is appears to be an "Enterprise" clase drive. Regardless I'm keeping the drive.

160 gig - WDC WD1600YS-01SB1

Do my observations sound correct? Would this 3rd drive actually transfer slower? From what I can tell these 3 drives are all spec'd the same.

Well the 160 gig has half the cache as the newer drives, data wouldn't be nearly as dense, and I'm sure there were other improvements done over the years. I'd expect it to be slower.

The RE series are great...currently they're up to RE4 I believe. Yes it's their enterprise drive...5 year warranty.
I agree, the performance difference is due to...it's a couple of generations old. Plus it's probably been used....drive performance degrades as they pack on the miles. Most current generation drives will smoke it simply due to its older technology...combine that with it being well used...and yes, seeing it be slower should be expected.

Thanks, I pretty much figured those were the answers but I just wanted to make sure I might not be missing someting. BTW... the drives are virtually new, they were from a backup server that only deployed on occasion. What the hell, another 160gb of storage... I'll take it. I actually have 4 of them and I'm going to be using them for backups that will be stored at different locations i.e. My Dads house, brother's house etc.

Easto wrote:Thanks, I pretty much figured those were the answers but I just wanted to make sure I might not be missing someting. BTW... the drives are virtually new, they were from a backup server that only deployed on occasion. What the hell, another 160gb of storage... I'll take it. I actually have 4 of them and I'm going to be using them for backups that will be stored at different locations i.e. My Dads house, brother's house etc.

reminds me of Crash plan, Free encrypted backups to external site in real time (or predefined time) Cool software