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Western Digital’s Caviar SE16 hard drive

Geoff Gasior
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Manufacturer Western Digital
Model Caviar SE16
Price (250GB)
Availability Now

300MB PER SECOND Serial ATA transfer rates are all the rage these days. Cutting-edge core logic like Intel’s ICH7 south bridge chips and NVIDIA’s nForce4 family support the faster I/O interface, and hard drives are beginning to follow suit—not that a faster interface is really needed. Even 15K-RPM SCSI drives struggle to sustain transfer rates that would saturate a 150MB/s Serial ATA pipe.

Western Digital’s Caviar SE16 is the latest hard drive to jump on the 300MB/s bandwagon, and fortunately, this Caviar is sporting more than just support for a faster Serial ATA interface. The drive also features a beefy 16MB cache and a stealthy all-black aesthetic that’s unlike any other hard drive on the market. Curiously, though, Western Digital has elected not to support Native Command Queuing (NCQ) on its latest high-performance desktop drive. Will that decision hurt the new Caviar’s chances against the latest NCQ-equipped Serial ATA drives from Hitachi, Maxtor, and Seagate? Let’s find out.


Read the label carefully, only the WD2500KS is a Caviar SE16

Drive specs
Although we’ll be focusing our attention on the Caviar SE16, Western Digital has actually updated its entire Serial ATA Caviar SE line to support 300MB/s transfer rates. As far as their spec sheets go, the Caviar SE and SE16 are largely similar. However, a couple of important distinctions differentiate the SE16 from the rest of the Caviar SE family.

  Caviar SE16 Caviar SE
Maximum external transfer rate 300MB/s
Internal transfer rate 93.5MB/s
Average read seek time 8.9ms
Average rotational latency 4.20ms
Spindle speed 7,200RPM
Cache size 16MB 8MB
Platter size 83GB
Available capacities 250GB 80, 120, 160, 250GB
Idle acoustics 28dBA 26dBA
Seek acoustics 33dBA 31dBA
Idle power consumption 8.75W
Seek power consumption 9.5W
Native Command Queuing? No
Warranty length One year (Retail)
Three years (OEM)

Most notably, the Caviar SE16 has 16MB of on-board cache, double that of the rest of the Caviar SE line. The SE16 is also only available in 250GB capacities, which saves cheapskates like me from choosing a drive capacity based on the most favorable cost/gigabyte ratio.

Apart from cache size and capacity, the Caviar SE16’s vitals are virtually identical to those of Western Digital’s 300MB/s Caviar SEs. Make sure you get the right drive, though, as the model numbers can be confusing. The Caviar SE16’s model number is the WD2500KS, while the Caviar SE is tagged as the WD2500JS. What a difference a letter makes.

It’s really no surprise that the Caviar SE and SE16 share similar model numbers considering the fact that they both spin 80GB platters at 7,200RPM. The relatively low-density platters are a bit of a surprise, especially considering that Western Digital’s competitors have pushed areal densities up to 133GB per platter. Higher areal densities can translate to faster performance by allowing drive heads to access a greater amount of data over shorter physical distances. According to Western Digital, the SE16 is simply an 80GB platter drive with a new logic board.

In addition to snubbing higher density platters, the Caviar SE16 also lacks support for Native Command Queuing (NCQ). Command queuing can improve drive efficiency and potentially performance by intelligently reordering I/O requests to reduce rotational latency, but Western Digital claims that adding NCQ to the SE16 would hurt sequential read and write performance. The fact that Intel’s vanilla ICH7 south bridge doesn’t support NCQ is also cited as a justification for the SE16’s lack of command queuing support, although it’s odd that Western Digital would use a mainstream south bridge spec to determine features for its “highest performance” desktop drive.

Moving to warranties, the Caviar SE16 is covered by a three-year pact, but only when bought as a bare drive. Retail drive kits, which are usually more expensive, are inexplicably only covered by a one-year warranty.

Normally, I’d preface our snapshots of the Caviar SE16 with a snooty comment about how it looks like every other hard drive, but surprisingly, it doesn’t. The Caviar SE16’s look isn’t wildly different, but a little goes a long way in a sea of look-alike hard drives.

Western Digital has gone with an all-black motif for the Caviar SE16, which really only involves coloring a normally bare metal plate on the drive. We’re hardly slaves to fashion, but the stealthy look is a nice change of pace, and something that modders with case windows will no doubt appreciate.

Flipping the Caviar reveals a little bit of color, although Western Digital hasn’t gone so far as to equip the drive with a black logic board. Interestingly, the drive’s circuit board faces inward rather than outward, hiding surface-mounted chips from prying eyes.

 

Test notes
Today we’ll be testing the Caviar SE16 against a wide range of Serial ATA hard drives. Not all drives are created equal, though. Differences in external transfer rates, spindle speeds, cache sizes, NCQ support, and capacity can have an impact on performance in certain tests. Keep in mind the following differences as we move through our benchmarks:

  Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ Barracuda 7200.8 Caviar SE16 Deskstar T7K250 DiamondMax 10 Raptor WD740GD
Max external transfer rate 150MB/s 150MB/s 300MB/s 300MB/s 150MB/s 150MB/s
Spindle speed 7,200RPM 7,200RPM 7,200RPM 7,200RPM 7,200RPM 10,000RPM
Cache size 8MB 8MB 16MB 8MB 16MB 8MB
Capacity 160GB 400GB 250GB 250GB 300GB 74GB
Native Command Queuing? Yes Yes No Yes Yes No*

The Raptor’s 10,000RPM spindle speed gives it a big advantage over the Caviar SE16 and the other 7,200-RPM drives. Technically, the Raptor is an enterprise-class drive, but as enthusiasts, we’ve never shied away from using enterprise gear in our personal systems.

We’ve noted that Western Digital decided not to support Native Command Queuing on the Caviar SE16, but we should note that the Raptor also lacks NCQ support. The drive does support a form of command queuing known as Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ), but host controller and chipset support for TCQ is still pretty thin. Our Intel 955X-based test platform doesn’t support TCQ, either.

Since Seagate makes versions of the 7200.7 with and without NCQ support, our 7200.7 appears as the “Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ” to clarify that it’s the NCQ version of the drive. The Deskstar T7K250, DiamondMax 10, 7200.8 aren’t explicitly labeled as NCQ drives because they’re not available without NCQ support.

Our testing methods
All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test systems.

Processor Pentium 4 3.4GHz Extreme Edition
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Asus P5WD2 Premium
Bios revision 0205
North bridge Intel 955X MCH
South bridge Intel ICH7R
Chipset drivers Intel 7.0.0.1019
Memory size 1GB (2 DIMMs)
Memory type Micron DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz
CAS latency (CL) 3
RAS to CAS delay (tRCD) 3
RAS precharge (tRP) 3
Cycle time (tRAS) 8
Audio codec ALC882D
Graphics Radeon X700 Pro 256MB with CATALYST 5.4 drivers
Hard drives Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 400GB SATA
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 NCQ 160GB SATA
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300GB SATA
Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB SATA
Western Digital Raptor WD740GD 74GB SATA
HGST T7K250 250GB SATA
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus D740X 40GB ATA/133
OS Windows XP Professional
OS updates Service Pack 2, DirectX 9.0C

All of our test systems were powered by OCZ PowerStream power supply units. The PowerStream was one of our Editor’s Choice winners in our latest PSU round-up.

We used the following versions of our test applications:

The test systems’ Windows desktop was set at 1280×1024 in 32-bit color at an 85Hz screen refresh rate. Vertical refresh sync (vsync) was disabled for all tests. All of the 3D gaming tests used the high detail image quality settings.

All the tests and methods we employed are publicly available and reproducible. If you have questions about our methods, hit our forums to talk with us about them.

 

WorldBench overall performance
WorldBench uses scripting to step through a series of tasks in common Windows applications. It then produces an overall score. WorldBench also spits out individual results for its component application tests, allowing us to compare performance in each. We’ll look at the overall score, and then we’ll show individual application results alongside the results from some of our own application tests.

The Caviar SE16 starts well enough, with the lack of NCQ support apparently not slowing it down in WorldBench. Note how much faster the Caviar is than our only other 16MB drive, the DiamondMax 10. Let’s break down WorldBench’s overall score into individual results to see what we can find.

Multimedia editing and encoding

MusicMatch Jukebox

Windows Media Encoder

Adobe Premiere

VideoWave Movie Creator

None of the drives really differentiate themselves in WorldBench’s multimedia editing and encoding tests, where the Caviar lurks in the middle of a tight pack.

 

Image processing

Adobe Photoshop

ACDSee PowerPack

Scores are also tight in Photoshop, but the Caviar SE16 manages to score a small victory in the ACDSee test.

Multitasking and office applications

Microsoft Office

Mozilla

Mozilla and Windows Media Encoder

WorldBench’s office tests don’t provide much opportunity for any of the drives to shine.

Other applications

Winzip

Nero

WinZip and Nero do, though. Although a number of drives fall off the pace in those tests, the Caviar SE16 stays in the top three in both.

 

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

The Caviar SE16’s boot time is average at best, but all the drives are pretty close.

Unfortunately, the Caviar doesn’t do as well in our level load tests, where it falls towards the back of the pack. It’s only a few seconds off the pace, but still slower than most of the other drives.

 

File Copy Test
File Copy Test is a pseudo-real-world benchmark that times how long it takes to create, read, and copy files in various test patterns. File copying is tested twice: once with the source and target on the same partition, and once with the target on a separate partition. Scores are presented in MB/s.

The Caviar SE16 performs well in FC-Test’s file creation routines, beating all other 7,200-RPM drives with the Windows and Programs test patterns.

Read performance isn’t as good, though. Here, the SE16 finishes in last place in all but one of FC-Test’s test patterns.

FC-Test’s copy and partition copy tests combine reading and writing, allowing the Caviar SE16’s quick file creation times to mask its poor read performance. Overall results are mixed, but the Caviar SE16 is generally faster than the Hitachi and Seagate drives.

 

IOMeter – Transaction rate
IOMeter presents a best-case scenario for command queuing, so the NCQ-less Western Digital drives should have a slight disadvantage here under higher loads.

Despite its lack of command queuing, the Caviar SE16 fares rather well in IOMeter. The drive’s transaction rates are among the highest of our 7,200-RPM drives, although it’s clear that the Caviar’s performance isn’t scaling as aggressively under higher loads as the DiamondMax 10.

 

IOMeter – Response time

IOMeter’s response time results show the Caviar at or near the front of the 7,200-RPM pack. The drive lags a little with the read-dominated web server test pattern, which isn’t surprising given the SE16’s weak performance in FC-Test’s read tests.

 

IOMeter – CPU utilization

CPU utilization is low for all the drives in IOMeter.

 

HD Tach
We tested HD Tach with the benchmark’s full variable zone size setting.

The Caviar SE16’s average read and write speeds are right near the bottom of the barrel; it’s no wonder Western Digital didn’t want to potentially compromise streaming performance by adding command queuing support. Drives with denser platters generally offer faster sustained transfer rates in HD Tach, so the Caviar’s poor performance isn’t unexpected.

However, the drive’s relatively weak read burst speed is a little surprising. The Caviar and Deskstar are the only drives to support 300MB/s transfer rates, but the Western Digital drive is quite a bit slower than the Hitachi.

The Caviar SE16 sits in the middle of the back in HD Tach’s random access time tests, but it’s at least faster than Maxtor and Seagate’s latest drives.

With HD Tach’s margin for error in this test sitting at +/- 2%, our CPU utilization results are essentially a wash.

 

Noise levels
Noise levels were measured with an Extech 407727 Digital Sound Level meter 1″ from the drives at idle and under an HD Tach seek load.

The Caviar is comparably quieter when seeking than at idle, but it’s not the most silent drive in either case.

Power consumption
Power consumption was measured for the entire system, sans monitor, at the outlet. I used the same idle and load environments as the noise level tests.

Although its idle power consumption is nothing special, the Caviar SE16 consumes a couple of watts less than the competition while seeking.

 

Conclusions
To put the Caviar SE16’s performance into perspective, it’s important to note that the drive’s $149 street price is higher than that of its most direct competitors. 250GB flavors of Hitachi’s Deskstar T7K250, which seems to do more with 300MB/s transfer rates than the Caviar, cost just $119 online. Drives from Maxtor and Seagate are also cheaper, with 250GB versions of the DiamondMax 10 and Barracuda 7200.8 selling for $110 and $123, respectively.

What does the Caviar SE16 have to justify its $25-40 higher price tag? Not much, at least as far as performance is concerned. The drive’s most stunning performance is probably in IOMeter, where with the exception of the web server tests, it does rather well. Otherwise, though, the Caviar SE16’s performance is at best even with other drives, and at worst, much slower. I suppose it’s impressive that the Caviar SE16 performs as well as it does; after all, it’s little more than a new logic board strapped to old drive technology. Still, it’s not nearly fast enough to be that much more expensive than the competition.

With performance failing to validate the Caviar’s higher price tag, the burden falls to other drive features. The Caviar’s warranty won’t get it done, though. Western Digital used to be one of the only manufacturers to offer three-year hard drive warranties, but the competition has since caught up. In fact, Seagate has even gone so far as to offer five-year warranties on all its hard drives, making the Caviar’s three-year coverage, which only applies to bare drives, look very plain.

At least the Caviar SE16 doesn’t look plain. It’s amazing what something as simple as a black drive plate can do for aesthetic appeal. So, if you’re dying for an all-black drive to complete your stealth PC mod, the Caviar SE16 is definitely worth a look. Otherwise, though, we see little reason to swallow the Caviar’s hefty price premium. 

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