TechARP takes a further look at the Western Digital RE4-GP 2 TB Hard Disk Drive. Here's a bit:

The 2 TB Western Digital RE4-GP is based on the 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Green. As such, it also spins at a slower fixed spindle speed - somewhere between 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM. This allows the drive to run cooler and use less power.

However, our tests showed that the RE4-GP runs a little hotter than its Caviar Green brother. Our tests also showed that the RE4-GP has a disk transfer rate range that hints at a much higher spindle speed. That could account for its higher thermal output. Thanks to its "possibly" higher spindle speed, dual processors and large 64 MB buffer, the Western Digital RE4-GP hard disk drive was able to trump the phenomenally fast Samsung Spinpoint F1 and Western Digital VelociRaptor hard disk drives, even though they have much higher spindle speeds of 7200 RPM and 10,000 RPM respectively.

Closer examination using IO Meter revealed that the RE4-GP was much faster than the Western Digital Caviar Green in all aspects but small, sequential transfers where it was slightly slower at reads and equivalent in writes. Without doubt, this is a really fast hard disk drive.

With that said, this hard disk drive is best used in RAID arrays, as it comes with TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) enabled by default. It should not be used as a standalone drive unless TLER is disabled.

Otherwise, TLER may reduce the reliability of the drive by prematurely aborting error recovery procedures. If you are looking to build a RAID array, the Western Digital RE4-GP hard disk drive is definitely worth considering. It's very fast, uses less power, has a low thermal output and comes with the all-important TLER support.