Advances in New Western Digital Drives

An anonymous reader writes "The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250 GB hard drive has 300 MB/sec transfer rate the drive has a monster 16 MB cache, both of which should make it one of the best performing 7200 RPM drives on the market. WD categorizes this drive in the "Highest Performance" section of its desktop market, so its safe to assume that is has solid performance without the expense of an enterprise level drive. With products like this available, advances are being made in the storage industry that are not being rivalled by those in other areas of computing, especially considering the price level of this drive."

Comments

This is not new or special

[Anonymous Coward]

WD released this drive at least 3 months ago, and other drives with 16mb caches have been out even longer.

This is just another useless anonymously submitted article by Sal Cangeloso that may in fact be a slashvertisement. Notice the price listing on the first page, unless of course you have your ads blocked.

Re:This is not new or special

[MoonBuggy]

Not only is it an advert, it's an incorrect one. If you want to be using an "enterprise level" drive, it's the 400GB WD4000KD you should get - same series (Caviar SE16), but the hardware is physically identical to the newest 400GB 'Raid Edition 2' from WD. The 400GB Caviar SE16 model is based on the 10k Raptor family of drives designed for maximum speed, whereas the 250GB SE16 is descended from the standard-issue Caviar family. The only place where the 250GB model beats the 400GB is the support of a 300MB/s SATA2 bus rather than the 150MB/s of SATA1, but since no drives can actually deliver anything like 150MB/s transfer, it's redundant anyway.

Note that I don't intend to advocate any one of these drives - I couldn't care less what you buy, I just want to lay out the facts properly.

Nice ad

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how do paying subscribers feel about seeing ads before everyone else!

YAPR

[legLess]

Yet Another Press Release. Nice to see that Taco's tight editorial control hasn't been impaired by too much turkey. The guys at XYZ Computing are giving each other high-fives right now.

Oh puhleeese

[$RANDOMLUSER]

A 3-platter 8.9mS seek-time 7200 RPM drive with a 16MB cache? You better use this puppy for video files, 'cause the only thing that's more tuned for sequential access is a tape drive.

File this under "Ads that matter".

Meta-Comments

[TubeSteak]

1. I don't like the warranty
2. I've had bad experiences with WD drives
3. I've had great experiences with WD drives
4. 250 GB isn't really 250 GB*
5. This review isn't comparing similar drives
6. My RAID array is faster
7. RAID-0 isn't really redundant

And my quick summary of the aritcle:
$125 (50 cents per GB)
SATA
Not the fastest drive on the market

*In this case, the formatted drive really does hold 250 GB

Re:Advances that aren't being rivaled?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Compare a video card from today to one two years ago, and do the same thing with hard drives.

I'm trying, but really the VGA plug won't fit the IDE connector. I'm so confused...