Western Digital Caviar SE 2500JS HDD – SATA vs. SATA-II

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Features of the Western Digital Caviar SE

Before we jump into what everyone wants to see, the benchmark data, we best have a look at the drive itself. The Caviar SE and SE16 are Western Digital’s first to market SATA drives supporting the new SATA-II spec line. The drives themselves come in 160GB, 200GB, 250GB and 300GB models.

Western Digital has two separate models, the Caviar SE and the Caviar SE16. Both drives have almost identical specifications, the only difference is the cache sizes - the SE has an 8MB cache, and the SE16 has, you guessed it, 16MB.

Looking at the drive, there is very little difference in physical characteristics that would distinguish the drive from any of the other Western Digital drives on the market. There are no markings on the drive that indicate SATA-II support unless you take a look at the jumper settings.

The back of the drive also resembles the back of all the WD SATA drives on the market. Western Digital is the only manufacturer that supports both SATA power connector and the legacy 4 pin Molex power connector on the one drive. A word of warning, don’t use both SATA and legacy power connectors together or you will damage the drive.

While there are no Master/Slave settings for SATA drives, there is a bank of jumpers on the back of the drive. Each controls a set of functions. Here you can disable SATA-II support and revert to SATA-150, disable Spread Spectrum clocking and a few other features that weren’t in the manual at this stage.

The bottom of the drive it totally clean. Western Digital puts the controller circuit chips on the inside of the PCB between the HDD casings. In all we would like to see the chips, as they could be actively cooled in a hot running system.