Western Digital Caviar SE 1600JS

A cheap and cheerful nugget of a drive for all your media storage needs.

Sometimes you don’t need the largest capacity, highest power, most massive heat generating parts on the market. Sometimes the aim is for quiet and relative cool, although with this usually comes the sacrifice of performance.

There’s a certain inner peace that comes with knowing your machine is running without being able to hear a damn thing. There’s also a huge incentive to keep things quieter if you store your PC in the same room as your bed, so you can leave things running overnight without being forced to get used to that grating fan noise, or PSU hum.

Such is the aim of Western Digital’s new single platter 160GB HDD, which will no doubt find a place in home theatre PCs, or in PCs belonging to owners who want it to be so quiet they don’t even know it’s on. Thing is, this plucky little drive still manages to perform quite well despite its inherent quietness.

While it only has 8MB of cache compared to the 16MB of larger, faster drives, this isn’t too crippling and helps to keep the cost down. Although it’s not perpendicular, it still spins at 7200rpm and is still SATA 3Gb/s, which means HDTach gave it a respectable score of 197.6MB/s burst and 64.8MB/s sustained. None too shabby. It’s also reasonably quiet too, but the equivalent sized Samsung still outperforms in terms of silence. This is not surprising, as although it turns in a slightly higher burst of 204.7MB/s, it also hands over a much slower sustained read of 51.6MB/s. This means the WD is a good compromise if you want a bit of extra sustained performance that’s on par with even Seagate’s newest perpendicular drives.

If you want quiet as well as performance, and don’t need the extra space to harbour an entire Internet’s worth of pr0n, then write the Western Digital 1600JS down on your wanted list.