Verdict: A premium drive in every respect

The Caviar RE2 has a lot in common with the Caviar SE16. Not only does it have the same 100GB platters, but it also has 16MB of cache. However, the RE2 is allegedly optimised for RAID (RE stands for RAID Edition). Aside from offering an MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.2 million hours, which is a lot higher than most mainstream desktop drives, the RE2 also supports NCQ, although it only has a S-ATA interface.

Despite this, the RE2 was the fastest disk in our Paint Shop Pro test, and only the Hitachi drives in S-ATA II mode were quicker at loading the Far Cry level. The SE16 wasn't far behind, though, and the HD Tach 3 RW results were identical. Like the Hitachi drives, it has an impressively quick access time, which goes some way to explaining why it did so well in our real-world benchmarks. Unfortunately, when we tried to test two RE2s in RAID, we got some extremely spurious results, so we can't comment on Western Digital's claim that the drive is optimised for RAID.

We've established that the RE2 is a very quick drive but, unfortunately, it's also very pricey. At £170 for the 400GB version, it costs the same per gigabyte as the Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB.

Considering that Western Digital's own 400GB SE16 offers similar performance but costs £20 less, and the RE2's performance in RAID is still unproven, the only reason for considering the RE2 is for its greater MTBF, which is only important if you're running a server.

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