Samsung SpinPoint 500GB T166 HD501LJ SATA Hard Drive

[trowand]

I recently picked up a new 500GB Samsung SpinPoint T166 "HD501LJ" 16MB cache SATA 3.0 hard drive. I got it from NewEgg for an incredible $130. I've been wanting to replace my three year old 160 GB Hitachi SATA C: drive for a while and have been keeping an eye on the plumetting HDD prices for a good deal. After checking out Tom's Hardware Guide's Hard Drive chart and seeing the Samsung's awesome performance, I decided to price it on NewEgg and was thrilled to see it for only $129.99 with free shipping. I couldn't resist. You should seriously look at the performance charts on THG. This Samsung drive is one of the best performing 7200RPM drives available. In many of the benchmark tests it finished just below the 10,000RPM Raptors and I think that in one or two tests it actually beat them. Then I read an article on THG about Hitachi's new 1TB drive and they mentioned the awesome performance of this Samsung and said that it's the best bang for the buck drive. Anyway, before swapping to this drive, I used HDTach to bench my older Hitachi 160GB Deskstar w/8MB cache and got a burst speed of 126 MB/s and an avg read of 48.8 MB/s. After installing the new Samsung, I ran HDTach on it and got a 132MB/s burst speed and an avg read of 68.5MB/s that's an avg read increase of 40-41%! This new Samsung is 40-41% faster than my old drive. AWESOME!

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html

[glc]

Not to disparage your choice, but the Seagate 7200.10's are also excellent performers and Samsung hard and optical drives do not have a very good reliability history.

[Mr.Ferrari]

These are supposed to be "quieter" and cheaper per/gb, but I have to agree with GLC. Those who i've seen use it, only use it for low profile data backup.

Slow too.

[trowand]

Well I certainly hope you guys are wrong. I of course know that Seagate, WD, Maxtor, Hitachi, etc. are better known brands of HDD but this thing is getting great reviews and like I said it kicked butt on THG charts. But I'm not too worried about it b/c as soon as the TB drives come out I'm going to get one of them for my main C: drive and make this Sammy my D: drive for backup. The terabyte drive Seagate has planned is supposed to have much denser platters which should make it much faster than Hitachi's. I think I read that Hitachi's is a 5 (x200) platter drive whereas SG's is a 4 (x250) platter.

[glc]

I have no doubt that the newer lines of Samsung hard drives are quiet and good performers, I've read the reviews too - I'm just concerned about the reliability. It's going to take considerable time for data to accumulate to sell me on them due to how unreliable their older drives were.