Review of the Samsung HM160HC, World's Fastest ATA/IDE Mobile hard drive

Review of the SAMSUNG HM160HC, World's fastest ATA/IDE notebook hard drive

Well I just received my new Samsung HM160HC drive last week after spending a lot of time researching ATA/ IDE laptop hard drives.
On notebook review, I have seen many posts by John Ratsey about his hypothesis with the Samsung HM160HC drive. His hypothesis was that the HM160HC by Samsung was the fastest ATA/IDE laptop hard drive. He believed that the drive was based on a single 160 GB platter design, and should perform equally as well as its 320 GB counterpart which is only available on the serial ATA interface.
Well I wanted to upgrade my laptop and I wanted to only upgrade to the fastest parts. I have spent many hours researching the internet looking for hdtune/hdtach benchmarks of the drive, and I could not find anything.
With no other actual proof of this drive being as fast as John believed, I bit the bullet and ordered the Samsung drive.
I ordered the drive from Lagoom for $75.14 including shipping.
When I received the hard drive, I was very eager to run some tests.

My test system:

My Dell Inspiron 8500 which I purchased 5.5years ago when I was 13yrs old.
The system was the first desktop replacement Dell ever made, and it cost me $2400 back in 2003.
The system has a 2.4Ghz P4m, 2.0Gb of Corsair DDR PC3200 memory running at PC2100 speed, nVidia go 4200, and now a Samsung 160gb 5400rpm drive.

The original drive was a Hitachi 40GB 5400rpm drive which came with the laptop. I am very happy that the drive has lasted just over 5 years without any problems.

The 40 GB drive was the best performance per dollar drive at the time of purchase. The only better drive was the 60 GB 5400 rpm drive, but I did not want to pay some $130 more for it. Actually over the 5 yrs I have had it, I have never used more than 30 GB of the drive.


Here are a few side by side comparison pictures of the two hard drives:

As you can see, the Hitachi drive which came with my Dell laptop is on the left, and the new Samsung HM160HC is on the right.



The underside of the two harddrives. The Samsung is the one with the pins showing. The Hitachi is the one with the adaptor over the pins.



If you look closely, you will see how efficient this new drive is.
The old drive took 1.0Amps of current, while the new drive uses only 0.85Amps of current. This is good news if you are concerned with battery life. The less power the drive draws, the longer the battery on your laptop will last.

The Hitachi drive is made in Thailand as are all other Hitachi hard drives and the Samsung drive is made in Korea where they manufacture all of their products.

What is also worth noting is that the Samsung drive comes with a 3yr warranty, which means that the company has faith in their products and they back them with a good warranty.

Now for the performance tests:
I installed the HM160HC into my dell laptop, and I booted her up. I was scared that the laptop would only recognize 137GB of data, but my laptop recognized the full 160GB of the drive.
As I remember with my Dell 8500, which I format every year or so, the installation of Windows XP takes about 45 minutes. With the new Samsung drive fitted, and using the same optical drive, the installation took only 23 minutes. This quick installation time was very relieving to me, since it led me to believe that this drive really can perform the same as the 320GB 5400rpm SATA drives.
After the installation finished, I shut the system off and timed 18 seconds to full boot. Now this was with no programs installed on the drive, just straight Windows XP Professional SP2.
I installed all of the software which my laptop uses, mainly: Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Premier and some CAD software.
Then I went and defragmented my drive. Thinking that it would take about 30 minutes, I went to finish another errand. I came back in 10 minutes just to make sure that the drive was still going, and it was already finished. I was amazed how fast this drive is.
Then I restarted and ran an hdtune test.
After loading hdtune, I set the benchmark to accurate and a block size of 8mb.
As soon as I hit start, I saw the high of the drive and I was so happy.
You can see why here:

HDTUNE results of the Samsung HM160HC drive:



Here are the other important tabs which hdtune has for this drive:
The health tab (reads the S.M.A.R.T. Diagnostics of the hard drive):


The info tab, which has other information about this harddrive:


As you can see this drive is extremely fast, and it is now proven to be the fastest ATA/IDE notebook hard drive on the market.

After installation of all of my programs on the Samsung drive my boot time is 37 seconds.
The Hitachi drive with the same software installed with a lighter Windows XP Home edition with SP1, had a boot tome of 1 minute and 52 seconds.

The boot times of the operating system have dropped drastically and demanding programs like Adobe CS3 suite take about one quarter of the time to load. I am very amazed by the speed of this drive. The new Samsung drive has breathed new life into my laptop, and it is actually as fast if not faster in loading than most laptops on the market today.
I have a 160 GB (2 platter) 5400 rpm drive in my E1505 which is almost 1yr old, and my 5.5yr old laptop starts and opens programs faster. It is actually more comparable in speed to my raid 0 array on my Voodoo server replacement laptop. I am shocked by the speed of this drive, and all of the 320 GB 5400 rpm drive owners and 200 GB 7200 rpm drive owners know what I am talking about. 52mb/sec is a huge performance jump for the ATA/IDE interface for laptops. If you do not know, the Samsung HM160HC performs the same as the 320 GB 5400 rpm drive by Samsung. The only difference between the two is that the 320 GB drive uses two platters where the 160 GB drive only uses one.
Both the 320 GB 5400 rpm drive, and the Samsung HM160HC perform near to identical as the Hitachi 7K200 in synthetic benchmarks.

Comparison of the Samsung HM160HC to common Serial ATA harddrives:





Well I am sure you all want to know some other information about how this drive performs: IE heat, noise and battery life.

To start off with heat, this drive is extremely power efficient. The drive takes less power than my original drive and packs 4x the data on one disk rather than two.
This drive utilizes one platter, which means that there is only one spinning disk and two heads (one for each side of the disk), instead of two disks and fours heads. Because of this high density design, the drive generates much less heat, since there are half the disks and heads as a conventional laptop hard drive.
The maximum temperature this drive has reached was 127F after running a full disk check which took about 75 minutes. As you can see the drive runs extremely cool and it is extremely fast.

The noise of this drive is well, very low. This is due to the fact that there is only one platter and two heads rather than two platters and four heads. Since there is only one spinning disk, there is essentially half of the turbulence generated inside the drive from the spinning disk. Now you want to know about noise, well this drive is rated at 24decibels. If this is so, the 40 GB Hitachi I have had in my laptop is around 35-40decibels. This drive is extremely quiet due to its small amount of moving parts. Some of us have more attenuated hearing than others, but I can insure you that this drive is extremely silent. When benchmarking the drive, you can only hear a very low hum from the actuator arm moving across the disk. Compared to my Hitachi drive, this drive is not noticeable at all. It is almost like the hard drive is not even on.

My laptop has two batteries, one primary 72WHR battery and a side smart bay battery with 48WHR’s. (Yes the first smart bay was made by Dell for this chassis back in 2003, not Alienware). Well my laptop when I first received it would get a little over 6.5hrs of battery life. Before the new hard drive, my battery run time clocked in at 4 hrs and 35 minutes. The smart bay battery is a Lithium Polymer, which has started to show signs of age. With the new Samsung drive the battery life is just over 4 hrs and 50 minutes, just shy of 5hrs. I am sure if I get a new smart bay battery I could get over 6.5 hrs of battery again.

Now for the comparison (All of these drives are ATA/IDE notebook harddrives):

Most people have reported that the fastest ATA/IDE mobile hard drives are the 250 GB 5400 rpm drive from Western Digital or the Hitachi 7k100 100 GB 7200 rpm drive.
Well these side by side charts will prove that the Samsung HM160HC is the fastest mobile ATA/IDE hard drive for a notebook.

The benchmarks for the 7k100 100 GB IDE, 40Gb Hitachi Travelstar drive and the Samsung HM160HC are provided by me, and the 250 GB Western Digital 5400rpm drive has been provided by D3X.



As you can see the Samsung HM160HC is faster than even the spacious 250 GB WD and the speedy 7200rpm drive. I did not compare the Seagate Momentus 7200.1 series, because it is about 10% slower than the Hitachi 7K100 series.


PCMARK 05 comparison between Samsung HM160HC, Hitachi 7K100 and Seagate 7200.1:




Well it seems that my initial run of PCMARK 05 was a different version than Phil used, so for sake of comparison I am deleting my old PCMARK run from this thread, and replacing it with results from the same version of PCMARK Phil used.

Please disregard 8.06MB/SEC from the first run. After a new run I am getting much closer scores to Phil’s and others HM160HC’s



If you are looking for the fastest drive for your laptop it is clearly the Samsung HM160HC, since it is both affordable, quiet, power efficient and it is extremely fast. The Western Digital Scorpio is the only other drive I would recommend since it is the second fastest ATA/IDE laptop hard drive. It may have a higher capacity, but it has a lower data density, since the 250 GB Scorpio has two 125 GB platters, while the Samsung drive has a single 160 GB platter. The higher data density of the platter in the Samsung drive allows the Samsung drive to out compete all other 5400rpm drives and even the fastest 7200rpm drives for the ATA/IDE interface. The Hitachi 7K100 does lead in the access time, but its lead is very minimal in overall performance, since it is about 12mb/sec slower than the Samsung drive. I should also mention that the 7K100 series is pretty power inefficient since the drive uses 1.1amps of power, which is significantly more than most laptop hard drives. Overall the Samsung Drive proves to be the fastest hard drive as it has a higher average sustained data rate, and a higher maximum and higher lower minimum transfer rates than the other drives.

I hope that many of you with older laptops will take the same route I have, and upgrade to the Samsung HM160HC drive. It really will be the best $75 you have ever spent on your laptop.

This has been a review by K-TRON Computing Corporation©™

 

Thanks for that review. I'm contemplating now changing the seagate 5400.2 that came with my acer for this drive.

 

Good Job,K-tron as usual.Rep'd

 

Great review, Chris..you put alot of work in this...Kudo's

 

I believe that the 7K200 and the WD Scorpio 250GB would give different results if tested in the same OS and machine as the other HDDs....just assuming because each OS and machine....may have different background services running and feeding on the hardrive [since you mentioned that some benchmarks have been provided by D3X] (is the pagefile accountable for that too..?? )....!! (and do differences in the versions of the HD Tune software cause variations in results.... )
Just an Assumption..!!
Good Guide for the IDE HDD owners....like myself.. +rep

 

Great review Chris!

 

I'm very pleased that my hypothesis (based on reading the datasheets) is vindicated.:smile:

Did you notice if the new HDD feels a bit cooler than the old one?

John

 

Looks like I know what HDD to upgrade to in my D410. Thanks for the review, K-TRON Computing Corporation©™

 

Thanks for the review. Unfortunately HDTune is a purely synthetic benchmark. To get a better idea of real life performance I'd like to see different benchmarks. It would be very interesting if you could time some Windows XP boots with boottimer.exe or PC Mark 05, or run some different application benchmarks like Veristone Wintest.

Here's how some of these drives do in PC Mark 05 booting Windows XP.

 

I will get some PCMark 05 scores for comparisons.
I understand where you are coming from Philflow, but the drive which Tomsharware tested is the Samsung HM160JC, not the HM160HC. Their is a difference between the drives. The one which tomshardware tested has a much lower score because the drive they tested was the 160gb 5400rpm drive by samsung based on two 80 gb platters, not one 160gb platter as is mine. This is evident becuase tomshardware rates the HM160JC you are talking about at 38mb/sec which is on par with the other 2 platter 160gb drives.

I can assure you that the HM160HC is the fastest ATA/IDE drive and I will prove it with different benchmarks later tonight when I get home from work.

John, the highest temperature the Samsung drive reached was 127F after extensive load. Under the same type of load, surface scanning, the hitachi drive it replaced would reach 144F
The Samsung drive is more power efficient and it shows in the increased battery life and cooler running temperatures

K-TRON

 

Yep you are right K-Tron I misread the name. Looking forward to the results of different benchmarks.

 

How about those PCMark HDD scores K-Tron? I'm really curious to see them.

I guess the 8,06 Mb/sec you mailed me was the the score of the Samsung 160HC. That would be a really good score.



Edit: although I don't know if it matters what kind of system the benchmark is performed on.

 

The old benchmark has been replaced by a real run. Prior I used a trial of PCMARK05, which was not 100% accurate. The real version is giving me much more reasonable results

I also included this in the first post



The test system is my Dell inspiron 8500 with 2.4Ghz P4m, 2.0Gb of Pc3200 memory (running at PC2100 speeds - cause of motherboard limitation), nvidia go 4200, and 160gb 5400rpm samsung drive.

As you can see, their is a large difference between the Samsung HM160JC and the HM160HC. The JC has two 80gb platters, and the HC has one 160Gb platter.

The Samsung HM160HC fairs pretty well against the Hitachi 7k200 which Philflow posted in the post above.
This thing really is fast, and I do recommend it for those with aging notebooks, who do not want to invest a ton of money to have more speed and capacity.
For $75 shipped it is the best drive you can get for the PATA interface.

K-TRON

 

Thanks for posting K-Tron.

XP Startup of 8,06 Mb/sec and General usage 5,54 MB/sec are really good scores.

I've got a Seagate ST980825A 7200rpm 80GB, XP Startup 6,896 MB/sec and General usage 4,156 MB/sec.

So based on these benchmarks (and comparing with Tomshardware) I think it is fair to say that Samsung HM160HC is the fastest ATA 2,5" hard drive .

 

Hmm, intresting! Would I be correct if I state that this one is faster and cheaper then the hitachi 7K200? There isnt a difference then (except the storage ofcourse)

Any reason to prefer the Hitachi?

 

No that would be incorrect. The Samsung is only faster in synthetic benchmarks. In benchmarks that simulate normal usage the Hitachi is faster.

For example:

While the Samsung scores 8,06.

Unfortunately we don't have more application benchmark results at hand, otherwise it would be even more clear. Besides that, the Samsung is ATA and Hitachi 7K200 is SATA, so different interfaces for different laptops.

PS. It is more than likely that the newer Hitachi 7K320 and WD Black Scorpio will be faster than these drives.

 

Yea, I'm following the 7K320 thread... You let me know when these thing hit the market in belgium/holland?

 

Simonov here you go: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=268370

 

now I'm really confused to choose which, Samsung HM160HC or WD 250GB, as now I'm using Toshiba MK6034GAX. Is the speed difference between Samsung and WD big, as in normal usage, can it be noticed?

 

No, I'm expecting it will be very hard to notice the difference in normal use. Maybe it would be something like 3 seconds difference on a 30 second boot or loading a game level. The WD has a bit better acces times so that makes up a little for the lower transfer rates.

Certain applications might benefit more from the higher write speeds that the Samsung gets, like videocapturing for example. But there won't be many.

If you really need the extra storage I'd say go for the WD.

 

for the WD, I believe it is this, right? WD2500BEVE

 

That's the one.

 

is there any chance for their price will drop in few weeks or now is the time to best time to buy?

 

I think these drives will not go down in price much. They may even go up, just like has been happening some 7200rpm ATA drives.

Have you checked prices on the Samsung too? Maybe you can get a better deal on them.

$92 is the lowest I see on WD. Pretty expensive imo.
https://oyendigital.com/hard-drives/store/NN2-54-250-IWE.html

While the Samsung is only $58
http://www.futurepowerpc.com/scripts/product.asp?PRDCODE=HDSA-NHM160HC&REFID=FR

 

looks like I'll stick for WD, samsung one hardly find someone selling on my place
mostly selling Samsung HM160JC

 

Yeah you don't want that one, it's a lot slower.

 

thanks for the help!!!

 

i bought my hm160hc from lagoom, and I think they ship internationally, so you should be able to have it shipped anywhere.
Its really a good drive.
The difference in speed between the wd and the samsung is rather small, but the samsung does have the leading edge, with its higher density platter, so I went with it.
If you decide on the WD 250gb drive make sure that your system does not have a LBA error which only allows your system to read 137Gb. If your laptop is older, you may have this problem. The only real way to get around it is to make two 137gb partitions

K-TRON

 

Thanks to this thread, I just ordered this HM160HC hard drive from Lagoom.com. $61.17 plus shipping. It will replace my original 4200RPM 40GB drive in an IBM Thinkpad R32

 

lol, this is faster than my SATA 160Gb 7200 rpm HDD

 

I am glad I was able to help, the drive is really amazing, and for the price it cant be beat.

Plunk10, let us know how the samsung drive works out for you. I have about 500 hours of use on mine and it is running strong, quiet and fast

K-TRON

 

My Dell E6400 came with the SATA equivalent (HM160HI). Very good performer, cool and quiet. I've now replaced it with a Fujitsu MHZ2320BH which I also thought was a cool and quiet HDD, but the latter is noisier and hotter in comparison with the Samsung.

John

 

K-TRON glad to hear that you have 500+ hours. Going into this, I was very concerned about long term reliability of this drive, as I'm aware of reliability issues with Samsung products not related to hard drives. From reviewers like you, it sounds like Samsung has a good thing going with this drive though.

 

I just installed the Samsung HM160HC harddisk on K-trons recommendation in my old ASUS L3800C (6 years old). I have been running that same old installation for 6 years and I'm only using that laptop for homebanking. Anyway with the original Harddisk (IBM Travelstar 4200 rpm) it took 7:01 minutes from hitting Power button until I was able to login to homebanking. I then used HDClone to clone my old crappy installation onto the new Samsung harddisk and then time was reduced to 3:00 minutes. Thanks to K-tron for the tip. That harddisk sure is fast on noise-less. I can't hear it at all - the machine is making too much noise to hear the new harddisk.

 

I am glad that the Samsung drive greatly decreased your startup times, but 3 minutes is still a very long time. You may want to clean the registry on your system, so that it runs faster.
Go to the start button, and than go to the run command. Than type in MSCONFIG.
In their you will find a few tabs. You should focus on the startup tab. Shut off any programs you do not use by unclicking them. Shutting off these programs will help decrease start time, and decrease the resources used by your computer.
Running disc cleanup and disc defragmenter will also help, because if the image you created was of a fragmented disc, you should defragment all of the files on the new drive. It will help increase performance a bit.

If your system is still running slow, you may want to upgrade your memory a little bit. (if you have 256 or 512mb, you may want to upgrade to 1gb or more if the system allows for it.)

K-TRON

 

Hi K-TRON, my name is Allen and I need to give a lot of credit to you and other posters for helping me through a hard drive upgrade. I might be able to add a little twist that older notebook owners might use. My pc is an HP Pavilion ze5375us from March 2003. It came with a 40gb Fujitsu MHS2040AT and uses an IDE driver called Ali M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE Controller.

I wanted to upgrade my hard drive and based on your information bought the Samsung HM160HC. I read this thread and many others to try and anticipate any trouble.
For example:
forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=305721
and wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/

To make a long story short, my bios will only recognize 137GB (of the 160), but worse would force the Samsung HM160HC drive to only operate in very slow PIO mode. Removing and redetecting the Primary IDE Channel would not get it to operate in UDMA Mode 5. My C partition is set to 120GB and the rest unallocated.
---------------------------
I made an improvement by updating the driver to Ali Ultra IDE Controller which causes the hard drive and CDRW to be seen as SCSI devices. The download link from ucdavis.edu document above is wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~leeey/a7a266/IDE4008.exe

The hard drive speed improved a lot but the cdrw drive was now getting bad block errors unless put in PIO mode. I needed to use the included Ali IDE Mode Utility to manually (instead of Auto) set the transfer speed of the hard drive to udma 100/133 and cdrw to udma33. The cdrw then worked better.
---------------------------
Now here’s the twist that I’ve settled on because I didn’t like the drives being emulated as scsi – (for instance SeaTools could no longer interrogate the hard drive). My thinking was if I could make the pc detect the Samsung drive as under 137GB everything would be fine except for throwing away some capacity.
So…
I made an Acronis image for safe keeping.
I made a Samsung ESTOOL boot diskette. samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html

I uninstalled the Ali Ultra IDE Controller and the pc reverted back to the original Ali M5229 driver. And the hard drive reverted to PIO mode.

I booted into the Samsung ESTOOL utility.
This will allow you to change the size by “Set Max Address” (but risk data loss).
I changed the Target LBA
From: 312581808 (152627mb)
To: 268435000 (131071mb)
Processed the change and removed the diskette.

I booted into Windows ok, it saw the drive as 137gb, but was in PIO mode. So I uninstalled the Primary IDE Channel in device manager and rebooted twice and Windows now detected and installed the hard drive in mode UDMA5 –yeah!

The best part is that HDtune shows the drive operating even faster with less cpu load than with the Ali UltraIDE driver. Here are the statistics as I captured them through this saga.

Original Fujitsu 40gb drive
HD Tune: FUJIYSU MHS2040AT D Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 2.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 22.3 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 17.4 MB/sec
Access Time : 19.6 ms
Burst Rate : 48.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 3.4%


Samsung at native size 160GB with driver Ali Ultra IDE (emulating scsi)
HD Tune: SAMSUNG HM160HC Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 2.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 42.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 34.0 MB/sec
Access Time : 18.0 ms
Burst Rate : 43.0 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 21.6%


Samsung sized at 137GB with original IDE driver Ali M5229
HD Tune: SAMSUNG HM160HC Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 38.7 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 54.3 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 51.0 MB/sec
Access Time : 16.6 ms
Burst Rate : 51.6 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 6.9%

 

What about a decent Solid State Drive? It would run circles around this one.

 

Really nice review, good comparison with other hard disks!

 

Did anyone get the HM080HC?

Should be even faster than the 160GB.

 

Thanks for the tips AllenAhl.
I am glad you are loving your Samsung HM160HC.

Phil, I thought the Hm080HC is part of Samsung's other line of lower density drives. I think John Ratsey said the 80Gb single head ide drive wass the HM080GC.
This is the only thing I have against Samsung.
Their way of modeling is very hard to understand, cause they use HC, GC, HI, and GI interchangeably between IDE, and SATA drives.

Sure SSD's may be faster, but they are not harddrives, they are SSD
Plus they are super expensive, which is a big turnoff. The Samsung drive is pretty inexpensive, and its performance is phenomenal.

K-TRON

 

My results with this hard drive on a pentium m 2.0ghz laptop and 2gb of ram

 

It'll look a lot better when you kill all the background processes. About 51MB/sec avarage.

 

Im not sure why it isnt getting 51mb/s. The only thing on the computer at the time of the test was windows vista. The computer is noticbly faster when going into sleep mode and hibernate modes. It boots up faster too.

 

Your hdtune post shows that the cpu usage was 23% at the time of the benchmark.
That means that their is something running in the background eating at your systems power.
Shut off any background processes through MSCONFIG or taskmanager, and run the benchmark again. That should speed the drive up, and it should get rid of all of the peaks you are getting.

K-TRON

 

Hello K-tron,
I just read this detailed information and what I am left with is that this is a superior drive. My question is if I can place this drive into my Dell latD600? Is it fairly simple for someone with minimal capability with tech can do? and is the information fairly self-directed?
Thanks
mgomez

 

The Dell Latitude D600 uses ATA harddrives, and accepts the latest ATA notebook standard, ATA-7. So yes the Samsung HM160HC will work.
It is a fairly easy process, simply turn the system off, locate the harddrive, and unscrew it.
Than install the new drive, and install the operating system and your good to go.
The D600 does not have any LBA issues, so it will recognize all 160Gb of its capacity.
Its a great drive, mine has held up well so far, and there have been absolutely no problems with it.

K-TRON

 

Thanks K-tron. Last question, backing up files?
mgomez

 

If I buy the bare drive will I get the 3 year warranty?

 

Yes you do. The warranty is based off of the sticker on the drive. When a drive is purchased the serial number is marked as "in use", so the warranty starts when you buy the drive. If you are buying the drive from ebay or from another person, the warranty started from when they purchased the drive.

K-TRON

 

I have a smaller 60GB Hitachi 7k60 and would love to move to a larger internal drive. However, I'd rather not give up the nice access speeds the 7k60 provides. I've looked around for larger 7200rpm IDE drives, but could find nothing other than a 100gb Hitachi, which for the cost, probably wouldn't be worth the upgrade. I've also come across this posting and a few others that mention the WD Scorpio 250GB and the Samsung 160GB as the 'fastest' drives for IDE notebooks. But it seems from this own posting's tests as well as my own HD marks that the Hitachi's are getting 15ms response times compared to the others 17 and 18ms access times while having higher sustained read/write speeds. Certainly the higher read/write speeds are nice for moving large files, but that doesn't happen too terribly often, and when it does, I don't mind waiting a bit longer to move a big file around whereas the access times directly affect boot up times, looking around a files, loading programs, etc. So unless there's something I'm missing it seems that my 7k60 w/ 15ms access times should be about 13% faster in day to day usage with running programs, booting up, looking around at files, etc. I hope I have missed something, that I'm wrong, and can upgrade to the nice larger drives, which is why I'm posting here. Thanks for your time, and any extra clarification on the topic would be great,

Ryan