Since the 40GB Western Digital Caviar from 2003-2004, the next drive I purchased from the series was the much larger WD Caviar SE 200GB drive. A slightly odd capacity, this was the beginning of my NAS building adventures which utilised many drives, of which the WD Caviar SE became my favourite for its unfailing dependability (except the 320GB version, which pushed regular longitudinal recording to its limits, resulting in an occasional weak sector). It was around this time that Seagate was also starting to play games with their (originally) 5-year warranty, which I took as a vote of no-confidence in their models.
The Drive
Since ditching the two-toned design and settling for an all-black look, they also changed their logo to a more modern looking one. This one has a new top-lid design which is flatter than previous models, with the base tub being taller and more “boxy” to accommodate. This drive was Made in Malaysia, designated with a JB designator for 8MB of onboard cache. Such drives were marketed as Caviar SE to distinguish them from their BB 2MB cousins.
The underside has no protective plate, instead they continue to mount the components on the opposite side, exposing only test/manufacturing connections on the rear of the board.
Labelling around the drive retains its usual configuration.
Performance Testing
CrystalDiskInfo
As this drive has performed server roles for a while, it has accrued a good number of power-on hours but still remains healthy. As promised, 8MB of cache is present, with firmware 08.02D08.
HD Tune
The throughput graphs still show this drive performing well, with an average throughput of 50.3MB.
The IOPS graphs are relatively nice and smooth, with no undue hang-ups, which is great especially as I was getting into video capture around this time and that could be a cause for dropped frames. The cache also seems to be doing a good job, especially for writes.
CrystalDiskMark
The CDM results seem slightly more optimistic than the HD Tune ones, although the 4kB write throughput seems quite good.
ATTO
Full performance is reached at 8kB accesses, but the small block accesses at even 512 bytes show quite good throughput levels, which explains why I found this drive to be amongst my favourites.