Western Digital HD choice, somewhat directed towards the hatter

I have two 250GB drive in my system: the stock seagate 250 GB, and the slowest western digital 250 GB kinda "budget" drive. The budget drive was given to me.. I would really like better performance under heavy high definition audio tracking with sampling in logic studio.
Being very limited on money.. I think I'm going to keep the seagate system drive, sell the western digital to my buddy who needs it, and get two 250GB western digital drives to be put in a raid 0 array. I want 250GB drives for the the $$ - I would much rather have performance than size.
I think I'm deciding between the WD Caviar SE16, and the WD Caviar RE. The RE says better raid performance, and it has a fast write time in its specs, and boasts long term reliability - something I would value in a vulnerable raid 0 system. I think I should get the RE?

Hi Hatter,
fair enough
I use both drives currently by the way; so here's my reasoning for my opinion and I would argue (nicely ) that WD would disagree that RE2 for single-drive use is the best way to go:
The only technical differences between the RE2 and SE 16 (other than the non-tech warranty, MTBF and burn-in periods, which I don't discount!) are
1. The TLER (“Time Limited Error Recovery”) feature which the SE16 does not have.
This feature changes the error-recovery window for the drive, which is fine, in fact, desired for a Raid array where it's redundancy features are expected to cover. However for a single-setup drive, or for Raid 0 this means that the RE2 is not as capable of recovering (in theory) and won't try as long
For drives that find themselves in a setup that features redundancy (anything other than RAID 0), this is a plus. For disks that don’t, it’s not.
2. The head tilting feature (RAFF) of the RE2 - which is a plus in a multi-disk, more-prone-to-vibrating environment (like Raid) but not so much in a desktop (high-end as it may be). Basically more vibration-tolerant.
Other than that, the electronics, features (NCQ etc.) seem identical. As far as I am concerned, this seems they are really electronically virtually identical with firmware optimizations geared towards Raid or single-drive usage; and varying warranties.
On the other hand, I look at more or less identical performance, but a (to me) clearly optimized for the non-redundant desktop drive in the SE16. For a Raid 5 or Raid 1 array (software or hardware) I'd go for the RE2 as well (I'd do either over the RE!).
Western Digital themselves say this about their RE2 series:
"Inside a RAID system, where the RAID controller handles error recovery, the drive needn't pause for extended periods to recover data. In fact, heroic error recovery attempts can cause a RAID system to drop a drive out of the array. WD RE2 is engineered to prevent hard drive error recovery fallout by limiting the drive's error recovery time. With error recovery factory set to seven seconds, the drive has time to attempt a recovery, allow the RAID controller to log the error, and still stay online."
Cheers,
Dan

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