Surprise From An Outsider: Samsung SV1204H With 120 GB — THG.RU

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The article first appeared in Tom’s Hard News Email Newsletter

An Outsider Surprises: Samsung SV1204H

When it comes to hard drives for the desktop, Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate are the brands that are known to almost everybody. IBM left the arena when it sold its desktop segment to Hitachi, Fujitsu has folded its sails and even Quantum was taken over by Maxtor a while ago. No question about it — the IDE market is a tough one.

However, there are other manufacturers out there. In the case of Samsung, many users don’t even know that this Korean company produces desktop hard drives. For many years now, Samsung has been involved in the low-end and mid-range sectors — and has met with success.

The struggle for highest performance and capacity can quickly become a survival issue, as the past has shown. Therefore, Samsung concentrates on the essentials; it builds reliable and technically advanced hard drives, and offers them at reasonable prices.

For this test, we received the latest top-of-the-line model, the SV1204H. With 5400 rpm and a 120 GB capacity divided between only two platters, this hard drive also promises competitive performance at low noise levels.

At The Technical Peak Of The Times: 60 GB Per Platter

The most important step in getting larger hard drives and increasing performance is to raise the data density (in bit per surface unit). The more information that fits on an existing surface, the larger the capacity of the disk drive. Analogous to this, the data transfer rate can also be increased using this method: the closer the sectors are to one another, the more sectors pass through the read and write heads per rotation.

Another advantage to having higher data density is that the fewest possible platters can be used per disk drive. This is an advantage because production costs are reduced (due to fewer materials and heads needed), as is the friction within the hard drive.

On the other hand, a high data density can also be used to boost the total capacity. The more data that fits on a platter, the larger the capacity of the hard disk. As an example, IBM used this method to the extreme with the 15-75 GB models of its DeskStar 75 GXP series — these had from one to five platters at 15 GB each.

Seagate and Western Digital have also announced products based on 60 GB platters (Barracuda ATA V and 2000BB, respectively), but these run at 7200 rpm and are geared toward the high-end sector. Therefore, they are considerably more expensive than the Samsung hard drive.

Interface: UltraATA/100

Even though UltraATA/133 has been introduced and Serial ATA has finally arrived, UltraATA/100 hasn’t actually been around for that long. The maximum data transfer performance of the latest drives is approximately 50 MB/s. Even when you consider the loss in bandwidth due to the overhead of the UltraATA protocol, UltraATA/100 still achieves over 80 MB/s in practice — this is a value that even the next generation of drives won’t quite achieve.

Here, we should mention the burst transfer rate: this corresponds to the maximum data rate reached when data is transferred to the system via the drive interface. This is not achieved by reading the surface of the drive, but when data is already within the cache memory of the drive.

Nowadays, IDE drives have 2 to 8 MB cache memory. In practice, it makes very little difference whether the interface transfers 100, 133 (UltraATA), or even 150 MB/s (Serial ATA). Switching to a faster hard drive makes a much bigger difference.

Technical Specifications

More information can be found at Samsung’s website:

http://samsungelectronics.com/hdd/sv1204h.html

Test Setup

Benchmark Results

Data Transfer Diagram

Data Transfer Performance

Burst Performance

Access Time

Application Performance: WinBench 99 2.0

Temperature

CPU Utilization

Drive Idle Noise

IO-Meter

Conclusion: Very Quiet and Inexpensive

The rotation speed of this Samsung drive (5400 rpm) automatically meant that it wasn’t going to break any performance records in these tests — you need at least 7200 rpm for that. By and large, however, the SV1204H performed respectably; Samsung managed to beat its direct competitor from Maxtor ( D540X) in several disciplines. In the categories of data transfer rates, access times, CPU load and ergonomic noise level, Samsung is the clear winner in terms of points. The Samsung drive really is extremely quiet when in operation, so that if you have it built into a PC case, and when it is not being accessed, then you practically cannot hear it.

The performance of the Samsung drive was not as convincing in the WinBench 99 application benchmark — in both the Business as well as the High-end Disk Winmark, the Samsung model was somewhat behind the Maxtor D540X and much farther behind the 7200 rpm drives.

From our point of view, the SV1204H will be appropriate for a computer that requires high-capacity storage in reserve, and, at the same time, needs to be as inexpensive as possible. The performance of the drive should be sufficient for current systems in any case. For another thing, this model can be considered if low noise level plays an important role, for instance, if you’re operating a small file server at home. If you’ve got one of these systems in the living room or even in the bedroom, then the quieter the better.

The Samsung drive continues to be a good alternative when it comes to delivering a good price/ capacity ratio — nowadays, extra gigabytes are hardly to be had for under $150.