BIOS: Technology Means Business

Western Digital is now shipping its new high-capacity 500GB Serial ATA (SATA) Caviar SE16 desktop hard disk drive (HDD). And it’s about time too - Seagate and Maxtor have had 500GB drives available for a few months now.

Providing a half-terabyte of capacity for data-intensive applications such as graphic design, digital video editing, personal video recorders and advanced business computing, the Caviar SE16 500GB drive also delivers speedy 7200rpm performance with a 300MB/s transfer rate, 16MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ).

The Caviar SE16 500 GB (model WD5000KS) hard drive may be ordered on the company’s online store for $349 (£196). Customers can currently take advantage of free standard shipping on orders of more than $200 (£112).

Heat is a major contributor to hard disk drive wear and cool drive operating temperatures help increase long-term drive reliability. Western Digital hard drives are designed to have the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity desktop-class hard drive, according to the company.

Lowering the drives’ power consumption means the operating temperature of WD Caviar drives is much cooler which provides for enhanced drive reliability. Cool drives are increasingly important for today's multi-drive and small-form-factor systems.

Today's PCs, digital video recorders and gaming machines are increasingly operated in environments where noise is less tolerated. Western Digital reduced Caviar drive noise levels to be virtually imperceptible to the human ear in home and business environments with its WhisperDrive technology, which features a highly efficient power driver design.

To reduce seek noise, SoftSeek technology streamlines read/write seeking algorithms, resulting in the drive operating more efficiently when accessing and writing data.

[Best HDD Pricing UK]
[Best HDD Pricing US]

Got this product? Got a camcorder/mic? Let us post YOUR video/podcast review!