Boot and load times
To test system boot and game level load times, we busted out our trusty stopwatch.

For whatever reason, our test system doesn't boot all that quickly with the latest crop of drives we've tested. The 640GB Caviar is faster than many others, including every terabyte model on the market, but it's not nearly the fastest drive here.

The SE16's game level load times aren't that inspiring, either. Only a few seconds separates the fastest drives from the slowest here, and while the 640GB Caviar does reasonably well with Doom 3, it's not even in the middle of the pack with Far Cry.