Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB: Cool, Quiet, and Quick
by Gary Key on July 9, 2007 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hardware Setup
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
| Standard Test Bed Playback of iPEAK Trace Files and Test Application Results |
|
| Processor | Intel QX6700 - 2.66GHz Quad Core |
| Motherboard | DFI Infinity 965-S |
| RAM | 2 x 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 Settings - DDR2800 - 3-4-3-9 |
| OS Hard Drive | 1 x Western Digital WD1500 Raptor - 150GB |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel 8.1.1.1010 Intel Matrix RAID 6.2.1.1002 |
| Video Card | 1 x MSI 8800GTX |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 |
| Optical Drive | Plextor PX-760A, Plextor PX-B900A |
| Cooling | Tuniq 120 |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX620 |
| Case | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
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yehuda - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
From your experience, are there any caveats to using a notebook drive on the desktop other than physical mounting? I mean something like this feature that parks the read/write head after a number of seconds of inactivity. This seems to result in an audible click which some people do not appreciate. For example, this is from a Newegg user's review on WD Scorpio 160GB:
"It's quiet 99% of the time but the 1% parking "klink" gets annoying quickly. It's in my MacBook Pro now but may soon be swapped to my PS3 where I won't hear the klink."
I think I'd be annoyed too. Have you noticed anything of that sort with your drives? Do you think it'd be an issue in a quiet environment?
yehuda - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
(Sorry about the double post)yehuda - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
From your experience, are there any caveats to using a notebook drive on the desktop other than physical mounting? I mean something like this feature that parks the read/write head after a number of seconds of inactivity. This seems to result in an audible click which some people do not appreciate. For example, this is from a Newegg user's review on WD Scorpio 160GB:
"It's quiet 99% of the time but the 1% parking "klink" gets annoying quickly. It's in my MacBook Pro now but may soon be swapped to my PS3 where I won't hear the klink."
I think I'd be annoyed too. Have you noticed anything of that sort with your drives? Do you think it'd be an issue in a quiet environment?
TA152H - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
Actually, I'm one of the weirdos that like a noisy hard disk, but only when it's accessing data. I know that sounds strange, but I'm used to it and it gives me an idea of what's going on without me having to look at the hard disk light. I really dislike not hearing the drive.Having said that, the small drives seem very, very quiet to me. I don't hear them at all unless they are accessing data, and even then they seem quieter. Mind you, this is for a completely fanless computer too, so it is very quiet. The bad thing about this is, your ears adjust to everything being quieter, and even though I bought the most silent DVD drive, for example, and run it at the quietest settings, it still seems so loud because everything else is so quiet. It's strange how humans always find a way to make themselves miserable :P .
The big consequence is, the performance is really quite low on these drives. I do like 3.5 inch 5400 RPM drives, and still use quite a few, and the notebook drives are considerably slower. I don't know why exactly, I guess they are spinning the same speed, but it's a very noticeable difference. The cost is really high too per megabyte. However, you save money on power (although, I doubt enough) and I could not run a fanless system with a standard hard drive, so it kind of was the only choice. The insides would get so hot from the hard disk, the CPU would fail. Now, just from convection, it cools itself adequately, and it's a tiny case (mini-itx). If you listen to things like Classical music on your computer though, it's worth it since you have absolutely no noise (except, don't even think about listening to it from the CD, the CD sounds like a howitzer).
The drive I bought does not have the parking behavior you mention, or at least I can't hear it if it does. To reiterate, if you do this, be prepared for abysmal performance, and possibly not being able to hear the drive when it's being accessed. I can if I really, really listen, but it's so quiet it's not easy, so it's useless. It's easier just to look for the light. But, it generates A LOT less heat and makes different setups possible.
defter - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
I've used Samsung 160GB drive for about 3.5 years, didn't had any problem with it.Frumious1 - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
I've got two 160GB SATA Samsung drives still going strong in one of my PCs. Another IDE 120GB worked for about a year and then fail, at which point Samsung sent me a replacement. However, the failure was hardly Samsung's fault. See, I put the drive into one of the old Antec cases where the HDD cage could fit 3 HDDs, along with the two 160GB drives I just mentioned. It hit 100+ F two summers ago, and I don't have AC. While I was gone during the day, the middle HDD died. I got home from work and found my PC had crashed, and when I rebooted I heard a nasty clicking sound. I opened the case and found that the HDDs were extremely hot, with the middle one probably at above 150 F. The replacement they sent is still working fine, two years later.FWIW, I also bought one of the newer 320GB SATA models earlier this year. No complaints so far. Honestly, performance with HDDs has become nearly the same - look at the application timing results and forget the iPEAK stuff. I don't run benches on my HDDs in regular use, and I'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between my Samsung (D:) and my Western Digital (C:), or any other recent 7200 RPM HDD for that matter.
Griswold - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
For every post like this I could give examples of seagates, WDs and hitachis failing more than once in the same environment - and it still doesnt say a whole lot about the overall quality of a brand due to small sample size. I suggest you go have a look at some substantiated statistics at www.storagereview.com.TA152H - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
Kind of weird when you get three lemons out of three. Not three out of 20, but I got three out of three. On top of this, Gary mentions he had problems. Hmmmmm, odds aren't so bad that Samsung makes rubbish now, or at least did. But wait, they offer less of a warranty than Seagate, and on top of this their expected lifetime of the product is less. Yes, all coincidence! Absolutely crazy to question their reliability.By the way Western Digital did have reliability problems, no argument there. I have never liked their drives. Seagate and IBM were my choices, but the IBM fiasco a few years ago turned me off their drives and Hitachi's. Samsung makes good products, which is the only reason I would try their hard drives again even though they sucked bad in the past. Fujitsu used to make a perfectly horrible hard disk too, but I guess they are gone. Asians don't seem particuarly good at motherboards or hard disks, I don't know why. They make them cheap, but they don't seem to have the reliability of American companies.
phusg - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
Were these 3 drives1. bought around the same time?
2. the same model drive?
3. used in the same computer/temperature environment?
There's nothing crazy about questioning reliability, but to generalise an entire companies products on the basis of a couple of failures is. This one really gets me though,
LOL! What American companies are making reliable motherboards? AFAIK almost all mobo's (good and bad) are made in Taiwan.
TA152H - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
No, they were all different models, and they were bought within three months of each other, but not at the same time.If you read my message, you would realize it's not based on a couple of failures, three of mine, and Gary's own problems, plus the low reliability rating from Samsung. Only a fool wouldn't put 2 + 2 together and realize something might be wrong with them.
I will help you with your motherboard issues. Most motherboards may not even be made in Taiwan, it's not altogether clear, but certainly many are made in the United States. All the best ones are. Ever heard of Intel? It's a big company, they go by the ticker INTC. Check them out. Of course, Supermicro is American too, and are the best with Intel in terms of reliability. Fancy them both being American, huh? Dell is also American, and they make their own motherboards, but their quality isn't really going to help my argument. I'm not sure where they're made, but if they're made in the U.S., they certainly illustrate how many still are. If they're not, they illustrate how American made quality is better.
Also, motherboards were not always made in Taiwan. Older computers were made in the U.S., and you can't kill them. Ever hear of a PS/2 motherboard going bad? Or a PC/AT? PC/XT? They just didn't die, we'd have room fulls of these machines and they'd go on seemingly forever (hard disks sometimes failed though, and memory did too, often times just from chip creep though). Now, you have this Asus junk plaguing the landscape, and motherboards die and it's not even considered unusual. It's not necessarily a bad thing, because they are cheap and still often outlive their useful lives, although not always. But, they are far less reliable than motherboards of the past that were made in the U.S., and the two most reliable motherboard manufacturers today are, not too surprisingly, American! So, stop acting so incredulous, it's uninformed.