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

Real world performance is influenced by acces times AND throughput AND I/O. Let's say, for example, 50% throughput 25% access times 25% I/O like suggested by Toms Hardware.

So a 15ms vs. 18 ms acces time is nice, but can be equalled out if the 18ms drive has higher throughput.

I upgraded from Seagate 80GB 7200.1 to Samsung HM160HC. I can tell you my system boots faster and hibernates faster. Application launching is about the same.

PCMark is a benchmark application that weighs in throughput, acces times and IO. As you can see in the attachment the HM160HC beats the 80GB 7200.1 in most situations. In application launching they are virtually the same.

 

Thanks for the quick reply Phil, you've rekindled my hope that I can upgrade the size of my laptop without downgrading the speed. So I take it that your opinion is that switching out my Hitachi 7k60 for a HM160HC or a WD25000BEVE would result in general use/application loading/file browsing being the same or improved?

 

Greatly improved. The old 7K60 was so painfully slow on my laptop. I upgraded to the WD3200BEVT which performs the same as the HM160HC, and the difference in performance was massive.

 

It will improve. Because as far as I know the Seagate 7200.1 80GB is already faster than the 60GB Hitachi 7K60. No doubt you'll see improvement.

 

Thanks for the info guys,

Phil, I can't seem to respond to your PM as I'm a new member, but to answer your question, I did run HD Tune on my 7k60 which came up with

HD Tune: HTS726060M9AT00 Benchmark

Transfer Rate Minimum : 11.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 39.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 29.7 MB/sec
Access Time : 15.2 ms
Burst Rate : 79.5 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 2.4%

 

I was hoping to just retain the same speed with an improved storage space, it's quite nice to know that I might be getting a boost in performance as well

 

Oh wow. I have the HD Tune graph as well somewhere. The HM160HC will be nearly twice as fast.
It will be more of a kick (A55) in performance, rather than a boost.

 

Well that is indeed quite exciting. The relatively low access time and high burst rate on my current drive in comparison to the 5400 drives in question led me to believe an upgrade would slow me down for everything aside from moving large files. I'm glad there's more to it than that, and I can upgrade without worry. Now I suppose it's just a question between the HM160HC and the WD2500BEVE.

 

I wouldn't say twice as fast (because acces times are important too) but the HM160HC will be noticeably faster than your 7K60. The HM160HC gets about 51 MB/sec average.

Between the WD2500BEVE and HM160HC, Samsung all the way. Single platter, better power consumption, less noise and faster.

 

When I had the 7K100 in my Dell inspiron 8500 (the test machine all of the benchies were made on), I noticed a decent performance gain by upgrading to the HM160HC.
It is not 2x as powerful as the 7K100 I had, but its noticeably faster. Adobe CS2 loads about 15 seconds faster on the HM160HC, than on the 7K100, and windows boots about 16 seconds faster with the Hm160HC, (total boot time is ~38 seconds)
The 40gb 5400rpm drive took about 1 minute 50 seconds to boot,
and the 7K100 took just under a minute (~55 sec) to boot.

The 7K100 is fairly faster than the 7K60 you have (~10mb/sec faster), so you will definitely notice quicker response from the system and shorter loading times.

K-TRON

 

Well thanks again for all of the information. When I looked at the original numbers from the HD Tune posts, the scientist in me wanted to do direct comparisons with access rates and burst speed coming in as most important with sustained read/write speeds coming in secondary. I was unaware that it was a more nebulous 50%/25%/25% relationship for overall speed which seems to make it rather difficult to make a decision based on pure numbers. Unless of course, it's always just about that same ratio regardless of the drive, in which case it would be back to simple numbers.

So when it comes to the comparison between the WD2500BEVE and HM160HC, or any drives for that matter, is the HM160HC being faster based upon the HD Tune numbers, timing of loading or some combination? I'm curious because their HD Tune numbers seem to place them neck and neck, with the HD160HC edging out in sustained read/write and the WD2500BEVE winning slightly in access times. So did you suspect the HM160HC would be faster based upon the single platter design, then validate it with loading times, or something along those lines?

Thanks again for the information. I certainly understand the mechanics behind how a harddrive works, but always assumed certain things about rpm, and access times for the overall speediness of a drive. You are all certainly being helpful with broadining my understanding,

Ryan

 

Good questions Ryan. Actually, it will be very hard to notice any real life differences in the performance between the WD and the Samsung.

The Samsung has higher transfer rates but the WD has slightly faster acces times and probably better I/O.

So in the performance department it does not matter what you get.

But, Samsung is one platter and WD two, meaning that the Samsung will be quieter and use less power (in theory). And I've seen several reports of the WD getting very hot, confirming the higher power use. That makes it a no brainer for me.

Add to that the fact that the Samsung is usually cheaper, it makes the choice even easier, in my opinion.

 

The Samsung drive is faster for this reason:
The HM160HC has a single platter with a data density of 160gb per disc
The WD2500BEVE has a dual platter design with a data density of 125gb per disc.
SInce more data can be fit on the same size platter, the Samsung drive has a higher bandwidth. It can read more data in teh same amount of time.
Again, my seek times for my drive may be higher because it was run on a near 7 yr old laptop.
I am sure Philflow can tell you his seek times.

The Samsung also has a higher application startup performance than the wd 2500beve drive, based on pcmark scores

My HM160HC never runs over 120F, so it is a very cool running drive, and it is very quiet, being a single platter drive.

K-TRON

 

Well I certainly wouldn't mind the extra 90gb as it always seems no matter how large of a drive one has, it will always eventually be filled but my preference lies with the cooler running, slightly faster option.

Thanks for all of your input, with all of these recommendations I believe I'll pick up a HM160HC from Provantage in the near future for a nice little sum of $50.

Ryan

 

Hi, I have a Latitude D610 with Pentium M 2.13, can you please let me know if I'm going to have significant benefits if I replace my Toshiba 80GB with the Samsung drive?

Below are my screenshots from HD Tune 2.55

Thanks!

 

@ Steliosx yes big difference. The Samsung HM160HC gets average transfer rate of 51 MB/sec. Almost twice as much as your current drive.

 

that's perfect, i can get this drive for € 50

another quick question:

Worth to also get a ram upgrade to 2 x 1GB PC5300 ? it's a dual channel mobo and it currently has 2 x 512MB @ 266Mhz

cpu-z screenσ:

 

Upgrading to the HM160HC is going to give you problems.
If you look at the info tab in hdtune, your system does not support drives over 137GB. The 48 bit address box is not checked.
So if you buy the HM160HC, you will need to partition the drive into say a 130gb partition and a 30gb partition.
You should upgrade the BIOS before upgrading the harddrive, because a newer revision may support drives over 137GB.

Other than that upgrading the memory will be very cheap, and should help increase performance even more.

K-TRON

 

K-TRON! Thank you for posting this review first of all, and thanks for checking my situation.

I did a search on dell forums and it appears that some people say it is working:

http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/18751106.aspx

also from the dell technical support page at http://support.dell.com/support/top...omponent=-1&lang=-1&doclang=en&toggle=false#1

If a 160 GB hard drive is installed in a Latitude D600 portable computer, the system BIOS will report the drive size as 137 GB. Systems developed prior to availability of 48-bit LBA drives may not include support for these drives at the BIOS level. The drive size will be reported correctly in the operating system and will function normally.

##

I hope it will work!

 

I assume you run XP. XP does not need more than 1GB unless you are really using it.

Check your memory use with ctrl-alt-del. If you never go above 1GB there's no point in getting more memory.

I never go above 1GB, even when I open 30 apps.

 

PhilFlow, thanks again for your reply
Main reason to get the RAM is to work with high-res images on illustrator and photoshop. These apps are eating my memory like nothing else

by the way my little old Latitude system hit 1' 30" at the pi test (2M)

 

Yes in that case you will be very happy with the memory upgrade.

 

UPDATE!

I finally installed the drive, and replaced memory with 2x1GB Crucial RAM.

Here is my "before" pic:

Average: 28.1MB/sec

and this is the "after" pic:

Average: 51.4MB/sec

Impressive!

I used Acronis True image to create the image from the old disk.. so when I restored the image on the Samsung, it could only see the drive as 128GB max. Is there any free windows utility that will let me resize the partition to utilize my unallocated space?

Only tried freeware EASEUS Partition manager, which failed to do it..

 

I am glad the new harddrive is working well for you.
You can try partition magic or gpart to change the partition size.

Please note you may not get the full 160Gb on one partition.
The info tab with the old harddrive shows that it doesnt support 48bit LBA, meaning it can only see 137GB = 128GB formatted.

The info tab with the new harddrive apparently shows the 48bit LBA support, so it may be able to see all 160GB = 149GB formatted

Hopefully it can see the full 160GB

K-TRON

 

Before:


After:


edit 1: dell precision m70, pentium m 770, 2GB, quadro go1400, 15.4 wuxga, win2008standard

edit 2:
After tweaking (spikes remove)

 

What did your tweaks include ?

 

His tweaks look like a disc defragment, and shutting off a few background processes.
To shut off background processes, type in MSCONFIG into the run command. Than shut off the services, processes and so forth which you are not using. That will decrease hard drive activity, and increase system performance.

K-TRON

 

This drive seems to be quite a good upgrade from the Momentus 7200.1 i'm using right now :

 

It should be a nice upgrade. Phil had upgraded from the 7200.1 to the HM160HC and he noticed a nice increase in performance.
You can probably turn around and sell your 7200.1 for say $30-40 or so
and than the upgrade really only costs like $20-30.
In my opinion, its definitely worth it

K-TRON

 

I finally got around to upgrading to the HM160HC a couple weeks back after a terribly long shipping delay. Sadly, although it appears as fast or faster than my previous drive it turns out the IBM T43 that I currently use is quite finicky about what drives it likes. I now receive an annoying alert at boot up as well as the disabling of the automatic harddrive unloading when a shock is detected as well as a few other features. Ah well, can't have everything. The stable of acceptable harddrives is quite limited, so I'll probably stick with this unofficial upgrade or revert back to the original. Thanks again for the advice,

Ryan

 

I hope so....if not i can still convert it to external with an ac-ryan case i've got...

Initial thought was to get an Mtron Mobi 3000 32GB for my Aspire 2003Wlmi ...but the price was high enough for such an old machine i guess....i'll wait 3-4 months or so, and if no new Pata SSD comes out, i'll go on an buy the Samsung.....

 

This thread will be updated soon
As a matter of fact the HM160HC now shares the number one spot with the HM080GC and the WD3200BEVE
The HM080GC is built on a single 160gb platter as is the HM160HC, however the HM080GC uses one head rather than two, so areal density is still the same.
I have seen benchmarks of this drive, and I may buy one soon for an older system which has a 48 bit LBA restriction to do comparative benchmarks.

So to make a point here:
If your laptop has a 48 bit LBA limitation, the HM080GC is the best drive for you
If your laptop does not have this limitation, the HM160HC or the WD3200BEVE would be best for you. Which one you get is based around what you want to spend and how much space you need. The WD3200BEVE is the largest to date PATA 2.5" notebook drive scaling in at 320gb 5400rpm.
It strikes me as to why Samsung did not release a dual platter 320gb model of the HM160HC.

Now the WD3200BEVE is based on a 160GB platter like the HM160HC, however it has two of these platters. So in essence the drive performs the same as the HM160HC. However I have not seen any benchmarks yet.

If you have a HM080GC or a WD3200BEVE, please run hdtune, and pcmark and send me the results via PM, so I can include them in this thread

Thank you to all who donate benchmarks, we need to keep this thread going since quite frankly this thread gets alot of hits and we need to keep it updated

K-TRON

 

Hi all, the Samsung HM160HC is really fast but in real condition and with PCmark on My NW8000 the 7K100 100Gb is a bit more faster due slow access time. With HD Tune testing on small file the 7K100 is faster than Samsung. The marging decrease with bigger files due the pure transfer speed is more importan than the access time.

I'm still looking for increase speed of my NW8000 (I love it too much! ) so the next step is the raid solution with 2 disk! (Damm HD manf that go only 7.2 drive with SATA interface! )

I find a second hard drive caddy to fit inside the notebook. I bouth the SATA version but the conversion chip offer poor performance (24Mb/sec instead of about 40Mb/s Hitachi 5K250), so I'm waiting for PATA version...

 

If the HM160HC/7K100 is not fast enough for you I think you should step up to a SSD for your notebook. Unfortunately their is not a mechanical drive faster than the HM160HC for the PATA interface. Some of the Samsung PATA SSD's are faster, but I cannot remember the model number off the top of my head.

I had the 7K100 in my inspiron 8500 and on all levels the HM160HC was an upgrade for me. Well nonetheless the only way your system will get faster is an SSD, or raid two mechanical drives together. I dont know if your system supports raid 0, so I cant comment there

K-TRON

 

I updated the first thread. I removed the inaccurate PCMARK 05 trial results I had. I replaced them with the values I was getting from a full copy of PCMARK 05.

I included an easy to read chart in the first page

If anyone buys a HM080GC or a WD3200BEVE please run PCMARK05 and post your scores. This way we can keep this thread as accurate as possible

K-TRON

 

Nice review on the Samsung HM160HC, it sure is nice to know on what is the best HD component on the market to have for upgrade purposes...

 

thanks, looks like I may end up using this for my Panasonic laptop! (If I could find one selling in NZ that is.....)

 

Hi,

I need help please off someone!
I recently purchased a HM160HC Samsung drive, and got it on a very nice deal. It is to replace a 3.5 year old 40gb Fujitsu in my Acer Aspire 1640 laptop.
However, once installed (correctly) it does not find a HDD ID in my bios settings, so I cant install Windows on the disk.

Please can someone talk me through what I need to do.....

Many thanks in advance

 

Smoggy,
when you removed your 40gb fujitsu harddrive, did you remove the interposer? (the small adaptor which fits over the ~40 pins on the end of the harddrive)

An adaptor is usally used on PATA based laptops, so if there was an adaptor on your Fujitsu harddrive, you should remove it and install it on your samsung harddrive.

Without the interposer, the drive will not be connected to the motherboard, and will not be powered, thus it will not turn the harddrive on.

K-TRON

 

I can't get this drive (HM160HC) to work in my Dell Inspiron 6000. When I replaced the original Hitachi 40gig I cloned it using Acronis and a IDE-to-USB2-cable. The Samsung drive works perfect with the USB2-adaptor, but isn't found at all in BIOS when I put it in the drive-bay (yes, I moved the pin adapter from the old drive). The POST process takes a really long time, and then shows a "Internal HDD error, press F1 to continue, F2 to enter setup".

I use the latest BIOS (A09). Any ideas?

 

I have an XPS M170. I believe my hard drive is going bad as my registry keeps getting corrupted. When I ran the system diagnostics at startup I found all kinds of drive errors. I have the Hitachi 80 GB 7200 RPM drive but it doesn't look like this drive is available from Dell anymore. I've tried to find a Travelstar 7200 drive but nobody seems to have them in stock. After reading this, I was going to go with the HM080GC, but it appears that nobody has these in stock either. What other options do I have for a good drive? Is the WD Scorpio 120GB (WD1200BEVE) a good one? What about the Seagate Momentus 120 GB (ST9120822A)? I have the 48 bit LBA limitation and don't want to have to have 2 partitions if possible.

Thanks!

 

jaxelsson,
the inspiron 6000 should have no problem reading the Samsung harddrive.
Two things come to mind in regards to your problem:
1) your harddrive is not set properly. There is instructions for setting the jumper on the label of your samsung harddrive. Master mode is no jumper, slave mode is a jumper on the lower two pins, and cable select mode is a jumper on the upper two pins.
Try all three modes to see if that changes anything
2) your laptop may not be able to read ATA-6/7 harddrives. Go to Samsung's website and look for a drive utility. You may need to change the firmware to run in ATA-5 mode



kyparamedic, the segate you mentioned is not based on the higher density 160gb platters, they will be substantially slower than the Samsung drive.
The WD1200BEVE is based on a single platter solution, but I am not sure if it is based on the 160gb platters or the 120gb platters.

You have a few options though,
1) you can buy the HM160HC, and just setup a 137Gb partition on it, (formats to around 128GB) You will not get the full 160gb out of the drive, but you can make the primary drive a 137gb storage drive. You can choose not to partition the rest of the drive, or you can make a secondary partition.

2) You can look on ebay for a used HM080GC,

3) if neither work for you, you can go with the WD1200BEVE, as that is your next best option

4) you can look on ebay or online for a Hitachi 7K100 or seagate momentus 7200.1, they are fast drives, not the fastest but they are still up there in terms of performance

K-TRON

 

K-TRON, thanks for the info. So will the HM160HC be noticeably faster than the WD Scorpio? I'm not sure I understand what you mean about it being based on the 120gb or 160gb platters. Wouldn't it be a 120gb platter since it's a 120gb drive or am I missing something?

Thanks.

 

This is a great thread! I wanted to chime in to suggest yet another alternative to the Samsung HM160HC/WD PATA harddrives. Why not use any of the SATA-to-PATA adapters if you have room to get higher SATA performance levels? This such adapter has performance notes against it claiming a SATA drive decreases from 64MB/s to 62MB/s using the adapter. Though, you'd probably want an adapter that looks more like this:

SATA-to-PATA adapter

From: http://www.cooldrives.com/2sahadrtoide.html

I mention this because the fastests PATA 2.5" drives are still only 160GB-per-platter drives. With SATA options, this increases up to 250GB-per-platter. Eg: WD5000BEVT with associated performance increases. If there isn't a lot of room to work with, could hack up a solution like in this thread. Though I do like the HM160HC's 0.5W idle power consumption, lower than any other 5400rpm drive.

 

I found a place with a HITACHI Travelstar 7K100 (HTS721010G9AT00) in stock. Would this be better than the HM160HC or WD1200BEVE?

Thanks.

 

I have the PCMARK05 loading scores in the first post. Check their, you will see that the HM160HC is faster than the 7K100 in all categories. Since your laptop has a 48 bit LBA restriction, it would probably be the best drive for you if you cannot find the HM080GC.

As far as platters go, a 160gb platter has 80gb on each side of the disc. A 120gb platter has 60gb on each side of the disc.

If the WD1200BEVE is based on 120gb platters, than it uses the entire platter.

If it is based on the newer 160gb platters, than the WD1200BEVE will perform like the HM160HC, in which it will have limited head movement restricting the head to only use 120gb of the disc.

This would be faster than a single 120gb platter because it is based on a higher data density

nando4, most laptops do not have room for such an adaptor, so it is not an option for most people. If a laptop has a extra 5mm of space to fit the adaptor it should work as long as the laptops chipset supports SATA, which it may not, hence why it runs PATA

K-TRON

 

Thank you for the info. Yes, I gather that room is a problem and if there is an extra 5mm then the adapter would work.

I am sure that there is no chipset support need for such an adapter. The onboard Marvell, Sunplus, Jmicron (or any number of other) SATA-to-PATA bridge chips does the conversion from SATA to the onboard PATA interface.

 

Oh yeah, remember you recommended this for my mom's laptop, K-TRON? Well, I haven't done any in-depth study, but it seems pretty wicked fast.

 

Thanks for all the info. I went ahead and ordered the HM160HC. The one place I found the HM080GC was selling it for $135and the only one on Ebay was a used one in the UK, and I'd prefer new with a warranty. I paid $62.99 for the HM160HC from newegg.com.

Now, will I be able to use the enclosure for my current drive?

Thanks again!

 

I remember that recommendation, it was sometime this summer.


Kyparamedic, you made a good move. The HM080GC is hard to find, so simply partition the HM160HC to 137Gb in order to get around the LBA limitations.

If you really wanted to, you could contact BIOSMAN, with your BIOS information and they could integrate a 48 bit LBA address into your Bios to see all 160GB.

K-TRON