Western Digital Green Power and raid edition drives

Has anyone had any experiences with the WD GP and RE drives?

I need 2 x 750 GB drives for a RAID 1 set up. The WD7500AAKS seem to be recommended a lot, but I was looking at the RE and GP edition drives too, and was wondering whether they are worth it?

Are the green power drives noticeably slower than the normal drives as they apparantly run at 5400rpm, or just marginally? The specs seem to suggest the GP drives are around 4-5db's quieter than the normal models, which seems quite a bit quieter on paper, anyone own them and able to tell if it actually makes much of a difference in noise?

The biggest advantage to the RE models seems to be the 5 year warranty and the time-limited error recovery feature. While the description of the TLER makes sense, have people actually found that to be a common issue? i.e. drives being dropped from an array due to the hard drive performing error recovery tasks that take too long.

Cheers

I use 2 x 250GB RE drives in RAID 0 and have done for over 12 months. I am still impressed by them and would deffo use them again.

I have been told that the REs are good :)

i have used a few RE drives (upto 500GiB) all seem to work no problems even from a pair of 160 in raid 1 on a 24/7 pc that has been running over 2 years

not all of mine are in raids but i do like 5 years warrentys

I have 4 of those 1TB drives running in RAID5 now, extremely quiet and energy efficient. 4 of those together doesn't sound as loud as my Freecom ext hdd (which use Samsung 500GB).

However access time is quite slow (due to the fact its <7200RPM). Sequencial read/write is quite good as well (capped due to my RAID card on PCI bus though)

I would say these drives are not good for single disk usage, but with multiple disks they're a godsend given the (much) lower heat / power usage -> lower fan speed.

I haven't tried but they could probably run fanless. Those disks are 4 degree cooler than a seagate disk in the same harddrive cage (i.e. same airflow)

Thanks for the response guys.

Decided I'll give the RE2-GP drives (WD7500AYPS) a go and see how they perform. May not be the fastest, but I'm a little more interested in lower noise/heat at the moment. Originally ignored them as they seemed to expensive, but as I found the drive for &#163;74.90 each with free delivery (3-5 working days) on Novatech, thought what the hell :-) With my luck I'll probably regret, but here's too hoping.