Throughout its existence, Western Digital has offered both consumer-end and SOHO server-grade storage. Although these two particular segments share many features, the server-oriented products usually have a higher MTBF and a better error tolerance, especially when designed for large Raid arrays. Western Digital's own WD5000ABYS represents one very interesting server-oriented SATA hard drives and it has come just in time to broaden WD's enterprise segment.



Judging by its specs, one could say that they did enlarge their server quota especially if you take into account that the original ABYS series has a MTBF of 1000000 hours. Aside from that, it still looks a lot like the consumer end KS, the platters are the same and it still has a 16MB buffer. However, WD claims that the ABYS series in all its forms (capacity-wise this line stretches from 160GB to 500GB) has a lot of improvements that regard the error correcting, but also the thermal and acoustics design.



The platters use the same 7200 RPM speed so there aren't any differences in terms of speed between the YS and KS versions. As far as error tolerance is concerned, this unit has been coupled with some specially designed platters and heads that produce a lot less errors than normal ones. The manufacturer doesn't say much about this system, but we believe it to be in the 10e14 segment just as other server-grade hard disk drives.



Overall, whether you're a multimedia user or you have your own server, this is a reliable product that also offers a good performance in read-write cycles and access time. And it's rather inexpensive too. The standard ABYS in its 500GB form is not quite as cheap as a desktop version but still fits in nicely with a rather affordable $140 price tag.