Western Digital Caviar SE Serial ATA 250GB

We were promised early last year that by now, ribbon cables would be a rarity and everyone would be sucking data from the CRC-checked thin cable bliss that is Serial ATA. We still don’t know what happened, because as the dust settled on the end of 2002 only Seagate had SATA drives readily available.

We were promised early last year that by now, ribbon cables would be a rarity and everyone would be sucking data from the CRC-checked thin cable bliss that is Serial ATA. We still don’t know what happened, because as the dust settled on the end of 2002 only Seagate had SATA drives readily available.

This has changed slowly, and Western Digital is now delivering its second foray into the Serial ATA marketplace, following up its 10,000rpm small capacity Raptor drives with a certifiably big-arsed 250GB of space. A quarter terabyte should be plenty of storage, even if it loses 18GB once the collision between marketing terminology and the reality of formatting hits. To sweeten this even more, the drive is part of WD’s ‘Special Edition’ line; with 7,200rpm drive speeds and 8MB of on-drive cache.

We ran the drive through our standard series of hard drive benchmarks, more to ensure it performed to the advertised specifications that to expose magical benefits of SATA (for now the benefits of the new attachment specification are numerous, but mainly mechanical and thermal). Thankfully the results matched expectations, the seek times and general drive performance did not vary greatly from those seen with Parallel ATA connections.

This is due to the actual drive mechanics being the same between Parallel and Serial ATA models, all that changes is the connection method. Western Digital has thought about the transition process, and as we are yet to see power supply units with SATA power connectors, it has added both SATA and Molex power plugs as a feature called ‘Flexpower’ (and it added a big warning telling you not to plug both in simultaneously for fear of nasty melting electronic smells).

Western Digital has yet again delivered a quality entry into the Serial ATA market. Sure, the drive costs a little more than the identically specced Parallel ATA model, but the advantages of SATA are worth the cash. The future is here, SATA is a reality and WD has delivered a great product for riding the transition.