Today we are looking at a new line of drives from Western Digital – the Se range. Click through to read our review of the baby of the new line – a 2TB drive…
Tag: hard drive
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Seagate HDD Date Codes
On Seagate drives you may see a Date Code – e.g. 07466. What does it mean?
Simply put, it’s in the format of YY:W:D, or YY:WW:D, where Y is year, W is week and D is day of week.
The year is fairly self-explanatory; the weeks aren’t measured from January, though, they are from the start of the financial year – e.g. July 1st, and they begin on the first Saturday after that date. The days figure is how many days from the beginning of the week the drive was manufacturered; the weeks are considered to start on Saturdays and run through to Fridays!
One wonders why they don’t simply put the date! In the case of the example above the drive was manufacturered on the 21st May 2007.
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Fractal Design Define R4: Removing all of the front drive trays
Someone asked how we removed the hard drive bays in the Fractal Design R4 builds we’re doing at the moment, so we wrote up a quick post for those who are wondering. If you want to install a radiator to the front of the R4 or are simply using a handful of SSDs and have no need for the 3.5″ drive bays you may wish to remove them; unlike the R3, where they’re riveted in place, the R4 features entirely removable drive bays.
Remove the thumbscrews on the front and the topmost tray will just slide out:
This will leave you with plenty of room to install almost any graphics card you might care to; it also improves airflow from the front uppermost fan as there’s nothing blocking the airflow. The second set of drive trays is a little trickier; have a look under the case for the first set of screws attaching it:
There are four in total here, two of which are clear in the photo. Once they’re removed, unclip the front panel by pressing out the plastic pins that hold it in and you’ll see the front screws holding in the drive tray:
There are only the two you see in the photo here. Once they’re removed, the drive tray lifts right out.
…and the top one:
They’re quite sturdy little units themselves and could certainly be re-purposed elsewhere should you have a need for drive trays!Now we have a front chassis that’s empty – until you install a radiator, that is… here’s a view of the newfound free space:
Happy disassembling! -
Western Digital Red Drive Performance Numbers: Sequential Read/Write
As a follow-up to our review (found here), we’ve finally finished testing the new Red drives and compared them to the equivalent Green drives.
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Western Digital 2TB Red Drive review (WD20EFRX)
Up until now Western Digital have separated their hard drive lines into three; Blue for consumer drives, Green for low-power drives and Black for performance. This has now been expanded with a fourth colour added to the stable; the WD Red NAS hard drive range. Western Digital tout these as being designed specifically for the usage patterns typically seen in a network-attached-storage (NAS) device – generally 24/7 operation, potentially poor ventilation and the likelihood of being in a RAID array of some description for mass media storage.
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Western Digital announce Red NAS drives
WD have announced a new line of drives specifically designed for 24/7 home and small business network-attached-storage use – dubbed the Red Series. Initial release information suggests improved power consumption across the board as well as improved performance and modifications to make them more suitable for constant use. The vibration compensation is quite interesting – 3D Active Balance, to use their term – and there is also mention of intelligent error recovery to prevent the drive dropping from a RAID controller.
You can read more about the drives here. Our testing unit is in-house and we should have some numbers soon!