The power consumption values, and implementation of variable rotational speed make it clear that efficiency was not an after thought for this Green Power drive. Incidentally, this drive was our winner the last time around. Newer drives have pulled ahead in speed, and thus have been placed higher, but it is worth noting that none of the other drives manage to match this drive's rated power usage of 4W and 7.4W at idle and seek respectively. This figure may not seem like much on initial observation, but think of 1, 000 drives, running day in and day out in a data center, and you can see the savings become considerable.

Name: Western Digital RE2 - GP.jpg Views: 50 Size: 24.5 KB

In Everest Ultimate's disk benchmarking tool, the WD RE2-GP managed an average of 77 MBps in the random write test. Random write averaged at 60 MBps; indicating that this drive is optiŽmized for data write rather than read. In our real world simultaneous multiple file read-write test, the RE2 GP took 885 seconds to complete the task. The RE2-GP's assured number of start-stop cycles is the maximum here - 600,000. However, the sheer performance of the other 3 drives sees them pulling ahead of this drive.