blooddrops :
thank you very much for your answer
I guess it depends on what WD ships you. I was pleasantly suprised yesterday having returned from Fry's after purchasing a 1 TB Caviar Black Edition that came up on the receipt as a WD100000LSRTL SATA/300 7200 RPM and 32 MB Buffer, having a fuller model number listed at the end of WDBAAZ0010HNC-NRSN (matching the serial number on the UPC label on the bottom of the box) and with the receipt listing a serial number of WCATR5838291.
The Serial number matches the label on the hard drive.
I was actually shopping for 1002FAEX's but Fry's seemed to be out of stock of them, at least in their bare drive section, and didn't seem to stock them in the retail kits. I read elsewhere that they were just the retail kits for another model (forgot which one).
But the hard drive is labeled a 1.0 TB WD1002FAEX w/ a 64MB Cache (vice the box's label of 32)! Also not sure if all the 1.0 TB Black Caviar's have the Sata III 6.0 Gb controllers on them (I know the disk mechanically can't come close to that).
I have had (2) 1002FAEX's running in Raid 0 on my Asus M4A89GTD Pro for almost a year now.
So far so good. Haven't had any problems. (knock on wood). My Windows Experience Index for my Hard Drives only posts a 5.9 for Disk Data Transfer on my PC with the Raid 0 Array.
I just assembled my wifes PC, also with a Phenom II X6 1090T, this time on a ASUS M5A88-V EVO, and put this new FAEX1002 in it (though was tempted to play around and put it in with my system, but didn't wan't to mess with re-doing everything all over again).
I was curious what the Windows Experience Index would say about this (1) 1002FAEX running in regular AHCI mode.
Was kind of perturbed that it ALSO got a 5.9.
Thought maybe I wasted my time with RAID 0 and needless exposed myself to data vulnerabillities (not that I have anything on them I couldn't live w/o that is not backed up...at least I say that now...).
So comparing HD Tune Pro on the two systems did vindicate (a bit) using the RAID option:
Asus M4A89GTD Pro Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Hexacore, 3.2 GHz, 9MB Cache Ser # 9H34713F00021
8 GB Patriot DDR 1600 MHz Tri-Channel (3x2GB) CL9 Viper Memory PVT36G1600ELK
Asus BC-08B1LT 6x Blu-Ray Read 16X DVDRW Combo
(2) Western Digital WD1002FAEX 7200rpm 1 TB Sata6 (6.0 Gb/sec each) Hard Drives in a Raid 0 (Stripping) Array Native Command Queing (NCQ)
EVGA GTX570 OC
Diamond ATI TV Wonder HD 750 HDTV Tuner and DVR Card
Corsair CMPSU-650TX Power Supply
Thermaltake Armor A90 Case
Windows 7-64 Bit SP-1
HD Tune Pro: AMD 2+0 Stripe/RAID0 Benchmark
Test capacity: full
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 114.1 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 257.6 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 194.7 MB/s
Access Time : 12.9 ms
Burst Rate : 267.0 MB/s
CPU Usage : 19.6%
The same model (on different motherboard, but pretty close, same processor, same size and general spec memory)
ASUS M5A88-V EVO Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Hexacore, 3.2 GHz, 9MB Cache Ser # 9R33082E10997
8 GB Corsair DDR3 1600 MHz (2x 4Gb) CMX8GX3M2A1600C9
Western Digital WD1002FAEX 7200rpm 1 TB Sata6 (6.0 Gb/sec each)
Corsair GS 600 600-Watt PSU
Thermaltake Armor A90 Case
Windows 7-64 Bit Professional OEM SP-1
running in AHCI only:
HD Tune Pro: WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 Benchmark
Test capacity: full
Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 61.8 MB/s
Transfer Rate Maximum : 135.1 MB/s
Transfer Rate Average : 105.2 MB/s
Access Time : 12.9 ms
Burst Rate : 217.6 MB/s
CPU Usage : 2.0%
So there is an improvement when dealing with large amounts of data being read with the RAID 0.
Now I can't speak for all of the WD Black Caviars regarding the TLER/TDLR concern, but for the WD 1002FAEX they seem to be fine on an Asus M4A89GTD in RAID.
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