Samsung HM160JI 160GB SATA Hard Disk

While I was waiting for the 160GB Hitachi 5400rpm SATA hard disk to become available in the UK, Samsung's equivalent, the HM160JI, appeared. The ATA version of this disk looked quite good in the hard disk review at Tom's Hardware http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/10/12/fujitsus_mhv2200bt_uk/. So I bought the SATA version to replace my Seagate 5400.2, which was short of space.

Samsung have a reputation for producing cool and quiet hard disks. In terms of quietness, this model is not exception. It purrs like a quiet fan and is difficult to hear except in a quiet room and without the CPU fan running. There is absolutely no clicking from the heads. As for the temperature, it was 1°C cooler after running a virus scan for 30 minutes compared to giving the Seagate HDD the same treatment. So maybe it is a little cooler, although the temperature under normal use is much the same (but this is probably strongly influenced by the temperature inside the computer).

Typical results from HD Tune are:

Transfer Rate Minimum : 15.8 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 45.1 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 34.8 MB/sec
Access Time : 19.0 ms
Burst Rate : 77.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage : 49.2%

But no two runs give the same results. On one occasion the CPU utilisation was 10.7%.

SiSoftware Sandra http://www.sisoftware.net/ has two hard disk benchmarks. The file systems test gave a drive index of 36MB/s with random access time of 13ms, and the physical disk test gave a drive index of 43MB/s with random access time of 18ms.

So how does the Samsung HM160JI compare with the Seagate 5400.2 in the real world? My attempt to replicate this was to run PCMark05 for both hard disks but otherwise identical hardware and software configurations. The Samsung's score was slightly higher (3579 PCMarks) compared with the Seagate's score (3371 PCMarks). Within the overall benchmark scores, the relative hard disk results were 4.004MB/s vs 3.604MB/s.

As I would expect, the higher data density compared with the 120GB HDD gives higher performance, although the real test is comparison with other 160GB 5400rpm HDDs.

So far, I'm happy with my purchase. If you can find the Samsung HDD then it provides a credible alternative to the Hitachi and Seagate products.

I hope this is of interest,

John

 

This news release http://home.businesswire.com/portal...Lang=en&div=-1993463876&newsId=20061114005844 gives a lot more details on this HDD. It's got more good features than I knew about.

John

 

I don't know about the Samsung, but the Seagate 7200.1 I just got is whisper quiet. Way quieter than the Hitachi three 7200RPM drives I have owned. I wasn't unhappy with the Hitachis either until I got the Seagate. So I guess a vote for Seagate.

 

Here is the ultimate notebook hard disk comparison chart.

http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html?modelx=33&model1=423&model2=417&chart=145

 

Useful chart - I hadn't seen that previously.

Thanks for the link,

John