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

[K-TRON]

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

[John Ratsey]

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

[plunk10]

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.

[JCAN_NB]

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.

[K-TRON]

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

[AllenAhl]

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.
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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%

[D111]

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

[CorossiNL]

Really nice review, good comparison with other hard disks!

[Phil]

Did anyone get the HM080HC?

Should be even faster than the 160GB.

[K-TRON]

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