Western Digital WD2500KS Caviar

Renown for creating the world’s first form of caviar that almost everyone can enjoy, this new three platters worth of fish eggs sports the next generation of SATA.

Renown for creating the world’s first form of caviar that almost everyone can enjoy, this new three platters worth of fish eggs sports the next generation of SATA.
 
The interface supports up to 300MB/s, but considering how the original SATA drives hardly came close to their 150MB/s theoretical rate, this is what we in the biz call ‘WTF marketing’.
 
To dispel a myth, a common mistake is for people to believe that any SATA II drive is capable of 300MB/s. This isn’t true. This idea stems from a committee called ‘SATA II’ (now known as ‘SATA-IO’) who defined the 300MB/s capability as one new capability for next-gen SATA drives.
 
SATA II brings an assortment of capabilities such as port multipliers (up to 15 drives per port) and true hot-plug capability, however at least one of two abilities must be true in order for a drive to be listed as being SATA II; it must have either Native Command Queuing or a transfer speed of 300MB/s.
 
This beast sports both, so for testing we armed up our 512MB DDR400, Athlon 3500+ system and compared it against the WD2500JD. In SiSoft Sandra, the drive index for the JD was 48MB/s with the Western Digital KS pacing along at 53MB/s. Buffered reads and writes were significantly improved, but you’re not going to see much in general drive use. The best bit was the average access time, with the KS scoring 6ms and slaughtering the 15ms of the JD. Packing 16MB of cache and a 250GB storage capacity, this 7200rpm hard drive is, theoretically at least, well-equipped for some high-end Desktop storage. If you like being on top of technology and just having the best toys, this drive just might be your catch.