Western Digital WD1600AAJS

Zitat

The Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS offered the best acoustics and thermals of any drive we have tested to date. Speaking of performance, the drive in our IPEAK tests was at times near the bottom of the group but usually placed ahead of the Maxtor 160GB drive, except in certain video/audio applications where the Maxtor's improved write performance resulted in better scores. In our platform applications tests the Western Digital drive performed very well considering its pedigree and finished with very good results overall for a drive that was not designed with absolute performance in mind.

What is our recommendation? If you are looking for a very quiet drive with excellent thermals then the Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS should be on your short list, as long as capacity is not an issue. The drive also offered good game play performance and was able to make a competitive showing in the general business application benchmarks. The WD 1600AAJS is currently selling for around $60 in the OEM version which offers a three year warranty instead of the retail drive's one year warranty and increased cost of $85. We find this drive to be a better bargain than the Maxtor DiamondMax 17 160GB drive selling for the same price, but we will reserve our final recommendations until we have tested competing drives from Samsung and Hitachi. However, with 320GB drives selling around a $90 price point and newer 500GB drives available for $150 now, we see the market for these 160GB being limited to those on a strict budget.