Test System:
DFI LanParty NF4 UltraD, AMD Athlon 64 3200+, 2x512 Mushkin 3700, HIS X800 GTO, PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 510 PSU

The installation procedure went extremely smoothly. After the drive was put into place, the appropriate connections were made, and then the system was rebooted. The drive was immediately recognized and formatted in NTFS.

After formatting, the drive was up and ready to go. The WD2500KS was tested against two other drives, the Maxtor 120 GB 6Y120P0, a solid, but unexceptional 120 GB, 8 MB, 7200 RPM drive, and the relatively new Western Digital Cavier RE WD3200SD, an enterprise level, 320 GB, 8 MB, 7200 RPM drive.

The first test conducted was done using SiSoft's Sandra. In this WD2500KS was pitted against Sandra's on-board benchmark results. and a drive index of 52 MB/s was found. WD's 3200SD tested in at 54 MB/s and the Maxtor earned 48 MB/s. This is a good test of a drive's overall capability, and from it we can see that the WD2500KS is a speedy drive, faster than our baseline 7200 RPM drive (the Maxtor) but still a bit behind the 320 GB WD which benefits from its large capacity. At this point it would seem that the benefits of a doubled cache size are not as great as those gotten from a larger storage capacity.

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The next stage of testing was done using HD Tune. This application measured a few qualities of the WD2500KS and then did the same for the other drives. The SE16's average transfer rate was 50.5 MB/s and the access time was 13.5 ms. The 3200SD came in at 63.6 MB/s and 13.3 ms, while the Maxtor was 50.8 MB/s and 15.4 ms. The score this drive earned were strong, though not remarkable, and the fact that it is not a upper-tier drive does show through.

One thing the drive does very well is run cool and quiet. Even under a load the SE16 hard drive stayed at a very reasonable temperature, usually at just 32 degrees C. This was of course helped by our case's 80mm intake fan but it is nice to know that if you have to stack a few of these drives in your case they will not cause a heat problem.