Better late than never, Western Digital has finally released a 500GB hard drive release for the desktop market. The WD Caviar SE16 is a SATA-II / NCQ supporting disk with 16MB of cache and a 7200rpm speed, all standard for 500GB. The only particular thing of note is SoftSeek, similar to other technologies but worthy a mention nevertheless, which helps reduce the noise of the disk. If you are in to silent computing, you know well how annoying the hum and grind of disk can be when inside a 'silent' chassis.

"To reduce seek noise, SoftSeek technology streamlines read/write seeking algorithms, resulting in the drive operating more efficiently when accessing and writing data.
It isn't exactly as quiet as a "whisper", but at 33dBA is at least comparable to others. It also offers around 25% less power consumption than other drives, which can be very useful for very small and compact environments that require loads of space, such as media machines or PVRs. The retail on this drive is $349.99.