Western Digital WD1600AAJS: 160GB Served on Single Platter

Final Words

We really did not encounter too many surprises in our testing as the performance generated by both 160GB drives was close to what we expected. Both drives performed well and followed certain patterns throughout testing based upon their design and target audience. The overall performance of the drives placed them consistently in the middle to lower end of our test group; this should not be surprising considering the competition. These two drives are designed for single user desktops where cost, thermals, and acoustics are just as important as performance and capacity.

The one exception is the lackluster seek times posted by the Maxtor, which can be directly attributed to its frequently poor performance in many of the benchmarks. It is not clear exactly why the Maxtor drive performs so poorly in this aspect, as nearly all other 7200 RPM drives made in the past several years generate similar results. It could be that our test drives are faulty, or more likely it simply has firmware that is not ideally tuned for faster access times. Whether this can be fixed via a firmware update or not remains to be seen. However, even with the slower random seek times, the overall performance is still decent. On the other hand, the Maxtor drive does appear to be better tuned for write performance than many of the competing drives.

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.

The introduction by Western Digital of their 160GB per-platter technology across the mainstream desktop product lines is occurring later than we had hoped, but we are finally seeing a wide selection of these drives in the retail market. What we look forward to is testing the new Western Digital SE16 WD5000AAKS series with the new three platter design to see how well the 160GB per-platter technology compares to the current high performance desktop 500GB offerings from Seagate, Samsung, and Hitachi. We expect this new drive will offer the improved thermals and acoustics of the 160GB drive while hopefully providing performance equal to or better than the venerable WD5000YS or Hitachi T7K500 drives.