As Western Digital’s highest performance mainstream disk, the new Caviar SE16 is aimed at those wanting higher capacity than the Raptor X provides, but without sacrificing too much speed.

Inside the black casing, there are four 100GB platters and eight read/write heads. A 16MB buffer is welcome but, as Samsung proves, not a necessity for great transfer rates. Formatted capacity is a spacious 373GB.

The only tickbox unchecked is NCQ (native command queuing), part of the SATA/300 specification that reorganises incoming disk access commands into the most efficient order. But a glance at our benchmark results shows the absence of NCQ doesn’t have a detrimental effect for general file copying or intensive applications such as Photoshop CS2.

With the Caviar hooked up to our test rig, our CS2 benchmark took 5 mins, 15 secs. This meant that only the Samsung and Raptor X helped Photoshop run faster. Although the difference between the fastest and slowest disk was less than half a minute, it underlines how important hard disks are for a PC’s general speed.

Running HD Tach RW, we found the SE16 came fairly close to its claimed seek time of 8.9ms – 9.03ms to be precise. This was quicker than the Samsung, but when it came to sustained transfer rates the Caviar couldn’t keep up with the SpinPoint. It managed a respectable 57MB/s even though its platters don’t hold as much data as the Samsung’s (which returned 61MB/s on average). The Western Digital was likewise close behind in the large file-copy tests, with an average read speed of 60.6MB/s and a write speed of 56.7MB/s.

Unlike the Maxtor – which struggled with very small files – the Caviar again almost kept up with the Samsung, reading at 19.4MB/s and writing at 12.9MB/s. As the other 7200rpm disks could manage only around 7MB/s for writing small files, this is impressive stuff.

Idle and seek noise was virtually identical to the quiet Samsung at 36dBA and 38dBA respectively. Even under load the Caviar didn’t become hotter than disks with fewer platters, measuring 37°C.

If you need more than 250GB in a single disk, the Caviar SE16 is a great alternative to the Samsung. At 76 cents per gigabyte, it isn’t quite as good value, but it’s faster than the bigger Maxtor and cheaper per gigabyte.