Samsung HDD. My findings :-)

[Zak33]

Lo dudes.

Well...after the uber positive praise of Samsungm, I tried one

A 320gig SATA drive. It's ideally suited to the taks I purcahsed it for, as it's a DATA drive for camcorder films, photo's and downloaded files etc.

Why do I say Ideally Suited?

A: Because you goiod people voted it least likely to die on it's owner

&

B: It's slow.

How slow can a HDD get? I mean....bloody hell.

I have the following, all of which I've installed XP onto, fresh.

Samsung 320gig 7200
Seagate Barracuda 80gig 7200.9
Raptor 74gig (yup...it's clear thats gonna be fastest)

BUT I did expect with the density of the 320gig drive, I'd get a faster machine that the venerable Seagates. Nope

Synthetic benchies (HD Tacho) and XP boot times, and Game loadintg times (IL-2 and Lineage 2...both big games)

minimum 10% slower than the Barracuda
minimum 30% slower than the Raptor.

Shocked? I am.

Thoughts ?

[Clunk]

You running it as sata 2? I have a 400gb samsung, the older 8 meg version and it feels very fast, even compared to the raptor. That one is running as sata 1.

[Zak33]

Raptor is SATA 1
Samsung is SATA 2

Definately.

[IAmATeaf]

I tested my 7200.10 Baras, a 250 and 500 giggers against an equivalent WD drive and found the WD drive at least 10% slower. Read that the WD drive may have been setup to be acoustically low in volume which could account for the perf diffs.

[Clunk]

Try it as sata 1, maybe your sata 2 controller isnt too great? Other than that, no idea

I'll run hdtach on mine in a sec and post the results here.

[moogle]

samsung make great and silent hard drives, but not all of them are going to perform better. i would only buy the 250gb, 400gb, and 500gb one. their performance on the tomshardware charts are better than their other models.

[[DW]Cougho]

Surprised at this.

My 250gb Samsung seems 99% as fast as my Hitachi 7K250 which was widely regarded as the fastest drive of its generation (excluding raptors etc.) plus it doesnt make that stupid meow noise the hitachi did when realigning its heads.

[Clunk]

Heres the hdtach benches from my samsung, raptor and an old maxtor.

Samsung 400gb 8mb long test.


Samsung 400gb 8mb short test.


Raptor 74gb 16mb long test.


Raptor 74gb 16mb short test.


Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250gb 16mb short test.


Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250gb 16mb short test.


Any use?

[tinners]

My Samsung Spinpoint 500GB (SATA2)


Looks a lot better than my sad old Seagate (SATA 1)