Western Digital has busted out its latest hard drive – the 3.5″ Caviar SE16 which offers a whopping 640GB of storage space thanks to 320 GB-per-platter technology. This technology has already been used in its line of products since January this year and looks set to being the foundation of Western Digital’s entire 3.5″ hard drive family.

Some of the key features of this new SE16 hard drive are :-

• Top performance for Windows Vista – WD Caviar SE16 SATA and EIDE drives are certified for Windows Vista and are top performers on the Windows Vista Experience Index.
• 16 MB Cache – Bigger cache means faster performance. A massive 16 MB cache combined with advanced acoustic and power-reducing technologies make these ultra-fast drives the perfect solution for the fully loaded PC.
• Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) – The latest generation of WD Caviar SE16 drives employs PMR technology to achieve even greater areal density.
• IntelliSeek – Calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption, noise and vibration.
• SecurePark – Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface resulting in improved long term reliability due to less head wear, and improved non-operational shock tolerance.
• StableTrac – The motor shaft is secured at both ends to reduce system-induced vibration and stabilize platters for accurate tracking, during read and write operations (750 GB only).

The WD Caviar SE16 640GB has been slapped with a recommended retail price of $139.99, making hard drives all the more affordable these days, giving you more storage space bang-for-your-buck than ever before. Guess if you are looking for some sort of storage solution for quite some time already, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the WD Caviar SE16 640GB model and place it under your watch list.

Product Page via Press Release