Great thread this, I've read through it all and wished I'd found it earlier having just recently bought a couple of 7200RPM Hitachi drives. I'm thinking I might upgrade again though to the Samsung.
Here are my results for the two 7200RPM drives I bought. These were both tested on a minty fresh installation of XP with SP3 slipstreamed on a Compaq NC4000, 1GB RAM and 2.1GHz Pentium Mobile CPU. Both disks were no more than 20% used and partioned into C and D with the C drive being 30GB in each case. HD Tune was left at the default settings although I might repeat them tonight on the "Accurate" setting.
Hitachi 7k100 (manufacture date May 07)
Hitachi e7k60 (manufacture date May 04)
The 7k100 has two platters so I'm guessing the single platter Samsung HM160HC with it's greater density is where the perfomance improvements are coming from rather than rotational speed and access time. I'm amazed that this one point would make such a difference given that hard disks are always sold on buffer size, RPM and access time.
However, it's encouraging that my 7k100 recorded similar times to K-Trons original test in the first post with different hardware. This would lead me to believe the Samsung would offer better performance.
The question of course, is whether it's worth upgrading the 7k100 to the HM160HC for the extra 10 MB/sec average transfer rate. Would the slower access time of the Samsung make a hit on performance reducing any gains from the single platter?
Samsung also sell the HM121HC which seems to be a 120GB version of the 160HC. Anyone have experience with this drive, is it also single platter and would it be as fast (or faster/slower) than its bigger brother?
And how important are burst rates and access times for everyday use? (browsing, email, occasional Word doc). Would partioning a disk impact performance? Finally, why set the block size to 8MB in HD Tune? What would be a typical block size to set for the above everyday use?
Thanks in advance and great thread!
Vic