WD Caviar RE vs. WD Caviar SE16

tg900

New Member
I'm loooking for a 250 Gig serial hard drive. Price isn't really an option since they are both relatively close in price. Here are my two options:

WD Caviar SE 16: Listed as Desktop Hard Drive, Model WD2500KS
$110
7200 RPM, 250GB, 16MB Buffer, transfer rate:300 MB/s


WD Caviar RE: Listed as Enterprise Hard Drive, Model WD2500YD
$132
7200 RPM, 250GB, 16MB Buffer, transfer rate:1.5 Gb/s

That is according to Western Digital's site, and one thing I'd like to know is what the difference is between the transfer rates? They use different units, so I can't tell which one has a better transfer rate. Does anyone think that maybe they mistyped the units or anything, and does anyone know of any additional information between both series?
 
yea well they both have a 16mb buffer rate so yea. and 300mb/s seems a bit slow but who knows. just take the second one in case. so if u take the cheaper one and it really is 300 mb/s u wont be dissapointed.

better safe then sorry.
 
i get confused with the ata/150 and the 300mb/sec. Does anyone know exactly what kind of transferate ata/150 is?
 
Note the difference between the MB and Gb - MB = MegaBYTES, Gb = GigaBITS. The first drive is SATA II (300MB/s), the second is SATA I (150Gb/s).

Because of the 8b/10b encoding, SATA speeds are often described both as 150MB/s (effective maximum transfer rate) or as 1.5Gb/s = 187.5MB/s (actual bandwidth). Likewise, SATA II is described both as 300MB/s or 3Gb/s.

For a little more info: http://www.sata-io.org/3g.asp

So to answer your question, ata/150 will transfer at a max speed of 150MB/s, which is the max speed of the second drive.

I'm not sure why the second drive is more expensive, but i'd get the first one myself. Keep in mind though, that the drives themselves can't transfer at this speed - it's just the speed of the interface. The actual working speed of the two drives would probably be nearly identical.
 
Back
Top