Western Digital Caviar Blue SE 16 640 GB


Capacity	640 GB
Cache	16 MB
Rotation Speed	7200 rpm
Taille	3.5''
Norme	SATA II

Régis Jehl
Test date: October 31, 2008

Unusual Capacity

640 GB is not one of the most common sizes for hard drives. Instead, most people are used to considering either 500 GB or 750 GB models, which use combinations of 250 GB and 334 GB platters to reach the desired size, sometimes exceeding it.

In this case, Western Digital has opted for a pair of 320 GB platters, giving a total of 640 GB.

Once you've formatted it, you're left with around 595 GB under NTFS.

Although it offers slightly less storage, this 640 GB version of WesternDigital's Caviar Blue SE 16 is a direct competitor to Samsung's 750 GB SpinPoint F1.

With just two 320 GB platters (see right), this hard drive manages to be faster than Samsung's at transferring large files, reaching read speeds of up to 102 MB/s against its competitor's 92.2 MB/s.

This excellent score means the Caviar Blue is almost as fast as its big brother, the VelociRaptor, which can reach 110 MB/s.
When it comes to medium-sized files, the Caviar Blue once again beats the SpinPoint F1, both for reading (85 MB/s vs. 81 MB/s respectively) and writing (90 MB/s vs. 85 MB/s respectively).

Even more pleasingly, this disk was one of the quietest we ever tested before we even thought about looking at noise management, reading just 38.8 dB(A) when idle and climbing only slightly to 41.1 MB/s during periods of intense activity.

Noise Management

Even these very low noise levels can be improved on by activating the Automatic Acoustic Management System, which causes noise levels to fall to 39.5 dB(A) while the disk is working hard.

To put it context, that's one of the best performances we've seen so far.

The price that you pay for silence, however, is a response time that slips from 12.8 ms (0.8 ms faster than the F1) to 16.7 ms (1.4 seconds slower than the F1) while data transfer rates also slip by 5 to 10 MB/s.