Samsung HM500LI

Does anybody on the forum has one? I looking for opinions on heat, speed and things like that before plunking $300 on that purchase. Link If you want to see what I'm talking about.

 

I don't own one, but I haven't heard good stuff regarding this drive. It is at the wrong end on the idle and max power consumption charts at Tomshardware.
I guess, kinda compressing 3 platters in a 9.5mm case wasn't a good idea at all....
I would avoid this drive if I were you. Probably look into the 320GB 5400RPM/7200RPM HDDs depending upon your needs. You could easily get a 320GB 7200RPM drive for under $200, and then buy an extra 160GB external drive, if in need of the 500GB space.

EDIT: I just noticed, 300 BUCKS for a HDD. Put in another 80 Bucks and you could buy a new notebook.

 

I thought the Samsung drive was good, it is the fastest 5400 drive on the market. It is faster than the 500gb Hitachi in hdtune and pcmark scores.
The samsung drive does loose on the power consumption test, cause it needs to use a higher amperage motor to keep three disks spinning at 5400rpm, which is considerably harder than having a 2 platter configuration.

Its still a good harddrive in my book. Even though it has a higher power usage, what does that translate to, say 5 minutes less battery out of 2 hours or so of battery.
If the storage is needed, their is no other alterantive for internal 500gb drives which fit the 9.5mm size.

K-TRON

 

Its fast, but the access times are crap.

 

Hitachi has a 9.5mm laptop hard drive?

 

No, Hitachi added an extra 2mm to fit in the extra platter. As such, it wont fit in most current laptops.

 

Samsung HM500LI gets hot and has very slow acces times. If you're ok with mediocre performance it could still be interesting.



(Image by Tom's Hardware. Direct link to this chart)

 

I would advise the OP to get the WD3200BEKT or the 7K320 for half the price and get an external HDD to cover up the gap left between 500GB and 320GB.

 

How does the 7k320 compare to the WD3200BEKT?

 

In the testing Andy did on his laptop the 7k320 was faster in 4 of the 5 PC Mark drive tests.

Andy reported the WD to be a bit more quiet than the Hitachi 7K320.

By the way, if you want the best fast harddrive for battery life the Seagate 7200.3 is the way to go.

Maximum performance: Hitachi 7K320
Maximum battery life: Seagate 7200.3
Mix of both: WD3200BEKT

Oh yeah, and the Seagate is the fastest in synthetic benchmarks like HD Tune.

 

Nicely put, there's a flavor for us all; Speed, Noise, Power Consumption. But in my books, all three 7200 drives mentioned are great and edging each other barely in each of their strengths. Weigh which you consider the post important out of the 3 main features and choose accordingly.

Speed:
1. Hitachi(barely edging out the WD)
2. WD
3. Seagate

Noise
1. WD
2. Hitachi Seagate Tie

Power Consumption
1. Seagate
2. Hitachi
3. WD

The last feature not mentioned is heat, but I don't think it's even a problem amongst all 3 drives.

 

I had 2 seagates in the past, one failed, and the other was spewing heat like it was nobody's business and I get SMART warning of impending failure everytime I turned on the laptop.... I tend to avoid them now...

 

I have it. Very good


vs

my ex 320gb toshiba


It is true that it consumes a little more power than the Hitachi 80GB 5400 hdd, but hell it is good

 

it is also hotter than the 80 gig one platter hitachi, but it is only as hot as any 320 gig hdd...so all in all I am quite happy with the M6 that I got for $190 delivered

 

and it is not slow so that I actually see any real life difference between the 160 gig 7200 hitachi drive that I had

 

thanks for the hdtune benchies, the 500gb drive from Samsung is pretty revolutionary, in that it has three platters all in a 9.5mm housing. It runs a bit hot, because of it having three discs, but there is really no other option for a 500gb standard height laptop drive.

K-TRON

 

there is WD I believe

 

There is a WD but it's not available yet. Some sites say in two weeks, some say four weeks.

http://www.span.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=22679&source=gbaseus&currency=USD

 

cool, so phil I really think they all use a universal harddisk platter manufacturer. It just cant be a coincidence that everytime a drive is released the other manufacturers also output something with the same capacity, data density and spindle speed.

K-TRON

 

Yeah I think you're right.

 

Or maybe they have the technology to give us the 1TB 2.5" HDD now, but prefer to give us something slightly better every 6 months so we do incremental upgrades and give the manufacturers more revenue.

More likely is that the R&D in the different companies is all running at a similar speed.

Now that WD is launching the 2 platter 500GB HDD, I wait to see whether Samsung will either treat us to 2 platters at 400 or 500GB, or 3 platters at 600 or 750GB.

John

 

Hi all!

this is my first post here so i would like to say howdi do to y'all!

Anyway, getting back onto the topic in hand, i actually have this samsung drive, running on an AMD 780g platform. my opinions on this drive are as follows:

1) extremely quick, my HD Tune benchs are an average 55.6MB/s and a the best minimum run i got was 44.2Mb/s with access times of 17.6ms thats better than my older WD2500BEVS and my MK3252GSX drives

2) my laptop is actually running longer on batteries using this drive compared to the other two (listed above) that i used to have

3) after running HD Tune on a loop for over an hour my recorded driver temperature was only 34 degrees.

I can't be certain if im running a newer variant of this drive, or i have something system specific but im definatly seeing better scores that those already posted. What did halp improve throughput and reduce access times for me was running the drive in IDE mode rather than AHCI.

My full system specs are as follows:

Athlon 64-X2 QL-64 2.1GHz
4Gb ddrII 666MHz
500gb samsung HM500LI
Broadcom a/b/g wireless
marvell yukon gigabit ethernet
ATI HD 3200 with dedicated 256Mb
Windows 7 64-bit RC1 + all latest drivers

fwiw: i got very similar scores in 32bit vista as well.

Thanks all,
Gavin


EDIT: oops i seem to have revived a long dead thread. sorry all!

 

Your drive does look a lot better. Especially the access time is remarkably lower.

No problem, it seems like this is the HM500LI thread.