WD Caviar SE16 250GB Hard Drive

Great Price, Awesome Performance, Quiet, Solid Benchmark Numbers

Posted Apr 27, 2007 - The WD2500KS comes from a long line of amazing drives put out by Western Digital they refer to as the Caviar Series. So when it came time to increase the storage of my gaming pc it was clear what drive I would purchase. The only question came down to whether what size drive to get. The 250Gb clearly was the best bang for buck sitting at $68.50 from ZipZoomFly.com. I bought 2 and set them up in a Striped Raid-0. Here's the results of my HD Tune for this array:

100% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Quiet as a church mouse, as reliable as a bible - the WD2500KS

Posted Aug 28, 2006 - What? Quiet, you bet! I bought two a while back for use in RAID 1 on an older computer. They performed so well, I decided why not again for my newest computer build, and I bought two more. The increased responsiveness of the older 2.2 MHz. Socket A computer running XP Pro 32 bit was immediately apparent, although the drives were only used in a mirrored storage array and not for the OS. No matter, I could spot the improvement over the older PATA drives I had been using for storage on the Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 motherboard - with transfers between drives taking place at greatly enhanced speeds. A slight change on mine was all that was needed from the start - with a jumper for SSC (an electronic FCC change made necessary by some chipsets and allowed for on the WD2500KS - check the manufacturer of your SATA chipset for the need), and the drives were instantly ready for operation at 1.5 Gb. While they are 3.0 capable, this older SATA chipset only met the 1.5 capability. This too can also be set manually by jumper if the automatic sensing cannot set due to some older SATA chipsets. Molex connections are provided with another for SATA power, but you only use one and SATA only for "hot swap" capability. The new ASUS M2N32-SLI needed nothing set or changed with its brand new chipsets, and my second set of two new WD2500KS were "plug 'n play" with Windows loaded to one after partitioning a 20 Gb. Windows partition for XP Pro 64 bit to install on. 3.0 speed was available and the speed with a single core Athlon64 3800 was immediately noticeable over an earlier used 7200 rpm 80 Gb. PATA drive with 8 Mb. buffer. One more thing to pass on. The WD2500KS drives run fairly cool and their threshold is similar to other good name brand drives, but just like any others - be sure to keep them cooled below 40 degrees Centigrade for long life. What more should I say? Operation on both machines has been flawless and the price is fantastic for this entry level Enterprise class drive. All that was needed on both computers was a quick format of the drives using the Windows repair feature at boot (drive: /Q /FS:NTFS).

89% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Quiet Drive

Posted Dec 18, 2005 - I have been using western digital hard drives for a long time. All of my past experience told me that WD is a reputatble company that makes good HD and they stands behind their products. Many friends of mine use WD hard drive and so far we have no problem. Same with this hard drive. This hard drive runs great as my data storage drive. Larger size cache makes the system runs less memory accesses for applications. More cache size makes the system runs faster since there is less need to go into the main memory for data, thus, improves the performance and prolongs the drive life (in theory). The SATA II interface is a great thing to have (if your motherboard supports it or if you have adapters for it). The throughput is improved quite a lot with SATAII. This is a great to have for future motherboard upgrades and sooner or later, all newer HDs will have SATAII as well.

78% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Western Digital Caviar SE16 250GB Review

Posted Sep 26, 2005 - I purchased this drive around a month ago. It has worked wonderfully. It is much faster than my previous 8MB 7200RMP 160GB PATA Drive. I have experienced absolutely no problems with it thus far. Paired with an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (Venice Core) CPU, and 1GB of RAM, my system boots in 12 to 15 seconds, and loads applications (Office 2003) within seconds. I am very happy with my purchase, and again, the difference between my old PATA 8MB cache and this drive is huge. I would greatly recommend this drive.

77% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Excellent Drive, Nothing to Complain About

Posted Mar 17, 2006 - I have had this drive for over 3 months and have not had any problems with it. I would definitely reccomend this drive. If the price is within range of other drives with similar specifications, I would choose this one over the other ones.

77% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

WD Caviar SE16 250GB Hard Drive

Posted Oct 30, 2006 - I bought a Dell Dimension about a year back and my Maxtor 250gb hdd started randomly clicking out of the blue one day. I immediately bought this hdd (My Dell warranty expired a few months after it failed) just before if finally failed. The installation of this drive was extremely simple compared to other things that I have replaced in other computers. The supplied driver cd was simple to use and I encourage you to use the Advanced Installation only because there are a few settings that might need to be changed depending on you hardware configuration. One thing I did notice was once you press the power button you hear the hdd click once. And when you shut it down you hear it click again. (I was told this is normal, something to do with head alignment) Other than that this is the only noise you'll ever hear! This drive is really fast compared to my previous 8mb cache hdd. Another thing i recommend is once you install your OS, antivirus, antispyware, programs, games, etc. run a disk defragment program (not the one that came with your OS) like Diskeeper, it will increase you boot time and increase the loading time of programs, etc.

75% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Very good HD

Posted Aug 23, 2005 - Very good HD for the price. I'm very impressed with the speed. It almost reach my WD Raptor. This unit don't have NCQ or TCQ but it's designed to work best without them. The installation on Win XP is very easy and smooth. This drive runs very cool too, no heat problems. Great choice.

72% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Hard driving hard drive!!!

Posted Mar 29, 2006 - This hard drive is the best hard drive for the price! So since my motherboard supports SATA II, and with the awesome reputation of Western Digital, i figured i couldnt go wrong. It fit effortlessly into my ATX case. Another plus is the 16MB cache.

67% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Great Drive

Posted Jan 31, 2006 - I think this is one of the better drives out right now. At the capacity and speed it has there is not a better value out there right now. Buy it!

67% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

RAID 0+1 Array

Posted Sep 4, 2006 - I Recieved the OEM Drives at a special Price of about $79.00 so i bought 4 of them . Installation was real fast without having to Wrestle the Darned EIDE cables.The Serial ATA Cables Connect 1-2-3.

67% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

WD 250GB HD

Posted Jan 30, 2006 - Easy install, but be forewarned that if you need cables or a utilities disk, get the retail version. Had this up and running almost immediately. Windows XP recognizes it after install. Using it for storage primarily. I've been a loyal Western Digital buyer for the last 5 years and my new system features this drive complemented by two 74GB Raptors.

64% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Great Hard Drive

Posted Sep 12, 2005 - I bought two of these and have them set up in a redundent raid array for my data. I also have 2 74 GB WD raptors in a striping array. These drives run very quiet. I cannot detect any audible noise from my case while in use. They are fast too. The NVidia benchmark program that came with my mobo benchmarked them at 353 compared to the NVidia 100 baseline. I've had many WD drives and have yet to have a problem with any of them.

64% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

decent size decent price

Posted Feb 15, 2006 - This is a pretty decent hard drive for the price. It is comparable to the other 250GB drives out there. As far as reliability goes, i own and or have installed other wd, seagate, maxtor, and hitachi drives. I like seagates reliability the best, hitachi or wd raptors for performance, and wd for a good mix of quality and performance. maxtors.... seen way to many of them die within a year to like them atleast the newer ones, i have a 6 year old 20GB drive still running 24/7. Don't know if i'm supposed to review the seller too, but chiefvalue.com had excelent service.

55% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

great product

Posted Oct 16, 2005 - it is a really nice drive for its price. I hightly recommand it if you are looking for a simple upgrade. So far, the drive is working the way it should be.

43% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?

Comment about this review

Very fast drive but a bit noisy

Posted Apr 26, 2006 - I read some very good reviews on this hard drive, and was very excited to purchase it for my high-end system. It turned out to be as reliable and fast as everyone said it would be, but I was disappointed that it made quite loud noises when the PC was booting (sometimes). I returned it for another one just like it to see if the problem would dissapear, but the replacement drive is still quite loud one in a while. Maybe I have really bad luck and received two defective items in a row... I guess I can try it again!

14% of readers found this review helpful. Did you find it helpful , unhelpful, or inappropriate?