the Re is surprisingly affordable and you will get to enjoy data transfer speeds and reliability that not many other drives can match

While specifications can only say so much about reliability, they do serve as general guidelines and the Re has all the right specs one wants to see when searching for a very fast & reliable HDD.The speeds I am getting with this 500 GB Re (as well as the 250 GB) are FAST

The biggest additions to the Re over the RE4 are the size increase, the speed increase, and the improvement in the rating of non-recoverable read errors per bits read

If you want to utilize the full read & write capability of this drive and you are using it as an external hard drive, you will need to use a high/super-speed port such as USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or

If you open up most of the pre-packaged external hard drives, you will quickly see that most have the lower-end drives and these drives do not have the best speed nor do they have the best reliability

(ideally the 3.0 Gbps revision, which is common.)Using a slower port like USB 2 or FireWire 800/400 will result in the connection throttling back the drive speed to only run as fast at the max speed of the connection will allow