Western Digital today announced it is shipping its new high-capacity 500GB Serial ATA (SATA) WD Caviar SE16 desktop-class hard drives. Providing a half terabyte of capacity for data-intensive applications, the WD Caviar SE16 500GB drives also deliver high 7,200 RPM performance with 300MB/s transfer rate, 16MB cache and Native Command Queuing (NCQ). The company said its WD hard drives are designed to have the lowest power consumption of any high-capacity desktop-class hard drive and that it has reduced WD Caviar drive noise levels to be "virtually imperceptible to the human ear" in home and business environments with its WhisperDrive and SoftSeek technologies (the latter streamlines read/write seeking algorithms). WD Caviar SE16 500 GB (model WD5000KS) hard drives may be ordered for $350.