Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB: Cool, Quiet, and Quick
by Gary Key on July 9, 2007 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Acoustics
Our acoustic test utilizes our standard test bed components but we implement Intel's power saving technology and turn off the case fans to isolate as much case noise as possible during testing. Our Corsair power supply is nearly silent in these tests and our MSI 8800GTX video card is water cooled by an external unit to provide a further decrease in our case's ambient noise levels. Our drives are attached to the drive cage with rubber bushings to assist in isolating the noise of the drive and avoid the resulting harmonic changes due to the case design.
Our acoustic tests are designed to measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and also under load while running the General Hard Disk Drive Usage benchmark within PCMark 2005. We found through trial and error that this particular benchmark produces controlled readings across a wide range of applications within the benchmark. This particular benchmark utilizes 60% reads and 40% writes within the trace playback file.
The measurements are taken at a distance of 5mm from the rear and front of the drive being tested in order to minimize surrounding environmental noise. We have noticed that unless we run a completely silent system in a quiet room that measurements taken from 1m are generally not meaningful due to ambient noise levels. There are exceptions like the Raptor series of drives but overall most modern desktop drives are quieter now than the other components in the system while under load.
The reported measurements are based on an A-weighted decibel score that measures frequencies similar to the way the human ear responds to sound. We take a total of three measurements for each test. We then subtract the high and low scores and arrive at our findings by reporting the remaining score.
Our Samsung SpinPoint T166 drive is extremely quiet at idle and subjectively speaking we thought it was quieter than our Hitachi 1TB drive. The drive had a slight "chirping" sound during Window's polling routine that caused the slightly higher readings. Otherwise, we found the motor noise at idle to be very soft and smooth when compared to our other drives. Our ears tell us this is the quietest drive we have tested to date although our measurements disagree.
We did not have any real issues with the drive's noise levels during light operations or under heavy loads as our measurements can attest. However, during heavy read seek operations we did notice an occasional dull but much muted tone from the drive that did not show up on our objective tests. This particular drive did have a slight vibration issue within the test case when the rubber mounting grommets were removed. In fact, the case would hum at times with this drive. Our base dB(A) level in the room at the time of testing was 25 dB(A).
Thermals
Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives and are reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.42 utility. We also utilize thermal sensors and infrared measurement devices to verify our utility results. We test our drives in an enclosed case environment without the fans operational to simulate temperatures that could conceivably be reached in a near silent SFF or HTPC case design. We typically find the reported numbers drop anywhere from 18% to 25% on average with the case fans operational. Our base temperature level in the room at the time of testing was 25C.
Our Samsung drive was 3.2C cooler at idle than our Hitachi T7K500 even though power consumption was slightly higher. The SpinPoint T166 also had the best load operating temperatures and the casing actually felt cooler than our readings indicated. Pardon the pun, but this is one cool drive. We saw the load temperatures drop from 45C to 38C under load conditions with the front fans operational.
Our acoustic test utilizes our standard test bed components but we implement Intel's power saving technology and turn off the case fans to isolate as much case noise as possible during testing. Our Corsair power supply is nearly silent in these tests and our MSI 8800GTX video card is water cooled by an external unit to provide a further decrease in our case's ambient noise levels. Our drives are attached to the drive cage with rubber bushings to assist in isolating the noise of the drive and avoid the resulting harmonic changes due to the case design.
Our acoustic tests are designed to measure the decibel levels while the system is at idle and also under load while running the General Hard Disk Drive Usage benchmark within PCMark 2005. We found through trial and error that this particular benchmark produces controlled readings across a wide range of applications within the benchmark. This particular benchmark utilizes 60% reads and 40% writes within the trace playback file.
The measurements are taken at a distance of 5mm from the rear and front of the drive being tested in order to minimize surrounding environmental noise. We have noticed that unless we run a completely silent system in a quiet room that measurements taken from 1m are generally not meaningful due to ambient noise levels. There are exceptions like the Raptor series of drives but overall most modern desktop drives are quieter now than the other components in the system while under load.
The reported measurements are based on an A-weighted decibel score that measures frequencies similar to the way the human ear responds to sound. We take a total of three measurements for each test. We then subtract the high and low scores and arrive at our findings by reporting the remaining score.
Our Samsung SpinPoint T166 drive is extremely quiet at idle and subjectively speaking we thought it was quieter than our Hitachi 1TB drive. The drive had a slight "chirping" sound during Window's polling routine that caused the slightly higher readings. Otherwise, we found the motor noise at idle to be very soft and smooth when compared to our other drives. Our ears tell us this is the quietest drive we have tested to date although our measurements disagree.
We did not have any real issues with the drive's noise levels during light operations or under heavy loads as our measurements can attest. However, during heavy read seek operations we did notice an occasional dull but much muted tone from the drive that did not show up on our objective tests. This particular drive did have a slight vibration issue within the test case when the rubber mounting grommets were removed. In fact, the case would hum at times with this drive. Our base dB(A) level in the room at the time of testing was 25 dB(A).
Thermals
Our thermal tests utilize sensor readings via the S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capability of the drives and are reported by utilizing the Active SMART 2.42 utility. We also utilize thermal sensors and infrared measurement devices to verify our utility results. We test our drives in an enclosed case environment without the fans operational to simulate temperatures that could conceivably be reached in a near silent SFF or HTPC case design. We typically find the reported numbers drop anywhere from 18% to 25% on average with the case fans operational. Our base temperature level in the room at the time of testing was 25C.
Our Samsung drive was 3.2C cooler at idle than our Hitachi T7K500 even though power consumption was slightly higher. The SpinPoint T166 also had the best load operating temperatures and the casing actually felt cooler than our readings indicated. Pardon the pun, but this is one cool drive. We saw the load temperatures drop from 45C to 38C under load conditions with the front fans operational.
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8steve8 - Sunday, July 15, 2007 - link
ive had 2 of these drives for 8 months now,, so the review seems late.obviously the new samsung 1TB 3platter drives are immensly interesting.
the specs and samsungs history in this market makes it seem to be the drive to have in the next 12 months.
natebsi - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
I've purchased 3 of these drives, and 2 have failed in about 4 months time. One was in my pc, the other was in an external enclosure. (The one still working is in my HTPC).2 out of 3 failures in such a short time is pretty bad.
However... the reason I won't be buying any more Samsung drives is not because they failed, but because they don't have an advance replacement program. That was fairly shocking to me! I took it for granted after sending it failed drives to Maxtor and WD (both of whom have outstanding service when it comes to that, BTW).
Hard drive failures are a given, and I can't deal with that. A drive failure is too critical a problem to wait for a replacement more than a couple days. In my opinion anyway...
Final Hamlet - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - link
Backup + cooling = No need to worry.I remember having a 20gb Western Digital Caviar, which did me the favour of giving me a special sign that it had come near the end of it's life, so I could replace it in time. If only all HDs could issue that kind of warning...
TA152H - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
Oh boy. Useful to know this. I guess I will wait to buy them.You're a lot more forgiving than I am. I really hate hard drive failures, because they take so long to recover from. It's the worst type of failure in my opinion. And also, because I'm stupid and go a few days without doing a proper backup sometimes. So, for hard disks, I value reliability more than any other part (except maybe the power supply, which tends to screw up a lot of things further down the food chain).
The replacement policy shows that Samsung doesn't quite get it. They don't seem to understand how important reliability is, or how important it is to get someone up and running again as quickly as possible. I always carry a spare or two if it's for a RAID array, but Samsung is selling these to residential people too, and no one likes being without their computer, and they aren't going to keep spare hard disks.
natebsi - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - link
It's not that I'm forgiving, its more that I've excepted the fact(or at least high probability) that any hard drive I buy today, from any manufacturer, will fail. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe 5 years from now.So as a consequence, I am extremely diligent about backing up my data. I use both RAID and a backup service from mozy.com for the most important data.
Also, I hear a lot of talk about how "Maxtor sucks!" or "Seagate sucks" or "<insert manufactuer> sucks!". The simple fact of the matter is: Without factual data from the hard drive makers themselves, there will NEVER be any method of determining which hard drive manufacturers are the most reliable. And none of them will ever produce that data for obvious reasons.
Case in point: I've had more hard drives than I can even remember in the last 15+ years, and I truly can't think of "the best manufacturer". Every time I've thought I had a great series of drives, I had failures at some point that made me rethink it. So...... backup, backup, backup, and go with the company that provides the best warranty, service, etc. Which, IMHO, ain't Samsung.
TA152H - Thursday, July 12, 2007 - link
Well, you have some factual data from Seagate, look at their warranty.Hard drives can fail, but I have had none from Seagate fail, and this included drives over 5 years old, actually, some over 10. And this goes back to the ST-255 and ST-251, although you'd have to low level them every few years because they were steppers. Crashtors I never bought, but they were so widely recognized as bad, it was way past anecdotal. IBM's drive problems were also not anecdotal, they were widely publicized and even recognized by IBM. Western Digital's were similar, although I don't remember exactly what Western Digital did to fix it. I had bought two of their drives around that time, and both died as well. So, it's not just people blabbing, some of it is very clearly bigger than that. I have never seen Seagate get into that situation, and they sell a lot of drives.
I actually did have a Seagate fail, but it was some 10K monster made in the 1990s, and it was left in a garage for about three years. I can't really blame it for that, it probably got stepped on and kicked and slept on by a raccoon. But, it worked before it's garage experience. Having used well over 200 Seagate hard drives over the years, just my own, not for a company, that's not a bad success rate, especially since the ones in my main machines I don't change often. The one on this machine is from 2001, and doesn't make a sound and is on 24/7. Try that with a Samsung.
I do agree, back up early and often. I forget to sometimes though, I wish I didn't, but I do. You really have no control over it, it can happen any time, so the only way to address that truly is to make sure the impact of it happening is limited. But, I'm a moron, I don't do it as often as I should, and I just don't seem to be able to get into the habit of it.
Gary Key - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
I am not too impressed with the Hybrid drives and Vista right now. ;) We will have that review up next week.crimson117 - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
How do I read the full blurb? On the main page, I seebut I can't find anywhere that shows the remainder of the text. It's not anywhere in the article.
crimson117 - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
I found the whole blurb when I do a search for the article.Frumious1 - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
If you click on the storage header that will take you to a page where you can see all the intro text for those articles - same goes for the other areas, of course. Not like it really matters much, does it?