Samsung SpinPoint T166 500GB: Cool, Quiet, and Quick
by Gary Key on July 9, 2007 2:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Hardware Setup
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
| Standard Test Bed Playback of iPEAK Trace Files and Test Application Results |
|
| Processor | Intel QX6700 - 2.66GHz Quad Core |
| Motherboard | DFI Infinity 965-S |
| RAM | 2 x 1GB OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 Settings - DDR2800 - 3-4-3-9 |
| OS Hard Drive | 1 x Western Digital WD1500 Raptor - 150GB |
| System Platform Drivers | Intel 8.1.1.1010 Intel Matrix RAID 6.2.1.1002 |
| Video Card | 1 x MSI 8800GTX |
| Video Drivers | NVIDIA Forceware 158.19 |
| Optical Drive | Plextor PX-760A, Plextor PX-B900A |
| Cooling | Tuniq 120 |
| Power Supply | Corsair HX620 |
| Case | Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional SP2 |
We are utilizing an Intel QX6700 quad core CPU to ensure we are not CPU limited in our testing. A 2GB memory configuration is standard in our XP test bed as most enthusiasts are currently purchasing this amount of RAM. Our choice of high-range OCZ Reaper PC2-9200 memory offers a very wide range of memory settings with timings of 3-4-3-9 used for our benchmark results.
Our test bed now includes a water-cooled MSI 8800 GTX video card to ensure our game tests are not completely GPU bound and to reduce noise/heat levels. Our video tests are run at 1280x1024 resolution for this article at High Quality settings. All of our tests are run in an enclosed case with a dual optical/hard drive setup to reflect a moderately loaded system platform. Windows XP SP2 is fully updated and we load a clean drive image for each system to keep driver conflicts to a minimum.
The drive is formatted before each test run and five tests are completed on each drive in order to ensure consistency in the benchmark results. The two high and low scores are removed with the remaining score representing our reported result. We utilize the Intel ICH8R SATA ports along with the latest Intel Matrix Storage driver to ensure consistency in our playback results when utilizing NCQ, TCQ, or RAID settings.
Test Setup - Software
With the variety of disk drive benchmarks available, we needed a means of comparing the true performance of the hard drives in real world applications. While we will continue to utilize HD Tach, HD Tune, and PCMark05 for comparative benchmarks our logical choice for application benchmarking is the Intel iPEAK Storage Performance Toolkit version 3. The iPEAK test can be designed to measure "pure" hard disk performance, and in this case we kept the host adapter consistent while varying the hard drive models.
We utilize the iPEAK WinTrace32 program to record precise I/O operations when running real world benchmarks. We then utilize the iPEAK AnalyzeTrace program to review the disk trace file for integrity and ensure our trace files have properly captured the activities we required. Intel's RankDisk utility is used to play back the workload of all I/O operations that took place during the recording.
RankDisk generates results in a mean service time in milliseconds format; in other words, it gives the average time that each drive took to fulfill each I/O operation. In order to make the data more understandable, we report the scores as an average number of I/O operations per second so that higher scores translate into better performance in all of our iPEAK results. While these measurements will provide a score representing "pure" hard drive performance, the actual impact on the real world applications can and will be different due to system factors.
Our iPEAK tests represent a fairly extensive cross section of applications and usage patterns for both the general and enthusiast user. We will continually tailor these benchmarks with an eye towards the drive's intended usage and feature set when compared to similar drives. Hopefully our comments in the results sections will offer proper guidance for making a purchasing decision in these situations. Our iPEAK Test Suite consists of the following benchmarks.
VeriTest Business Winstone 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Microsoft Office XP, WinZip 8.1, and Norton Antivirus 2003.
VeriTest Multimedia Content Creation 2004: trace file of the entire test suite that includes applications such as Adobe Photoshop 7.01, Macromedia Director MX 9.0, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0, Newtek Lightwave 3D 7.5b, and others.
AVG Antivirus 7.5: trace file of a complete antivirus scan on our test bed hard drive.
Microsoft Disk Defragmenter: trace file of the complete defragmentation process after the operating system and all applications were installed on our test bed hard drive.
WinRAR 3.70: trace file of creating a single compressed file consisting of 444 files in 10 different folders totaling 602MB. The test is split into the time it takes to compress the files and the time it takes to decompress the files.
File Transfer: individual trace files of transferring the Office Space DVD files to our source drive and transferring the files back to our test drive. The content being transferred consists of 29 files with a content size of 7.55GB.
AnyDVD 6.1: trace file of the time it takes to "rip" the Office Space DVD. We first copy the entire DVD over to our source drives, defragment the drive, and then measure the time it takes for AnyDVD to "rip" the contents to our test drive. While this is not ideal, it does remove the optical drive as a potential bottleneck during the extraction process and allows us to track the write performance of the drive.
Nero Recode 2: trace file of the time it takes to shrink the entire Office Space DVD that was extracted in the AnyDVD process into a single 4.5GB DVD image.
Game Installation: individual trace files of the time it takes to install Sims 2 and Battlefield 2. We copy each DVD to our secondary test drives, defragment the drive, and then install each game to our source drive.
Game Play: individual trace files that capture the startup and about 15 minutes of game play in each game. The Sims 2 trace file consists of the time it takes to select a preconfigured character, setup a university, downtown, business from each expansion pack (preloaded), and then visit each section before returning home. Our final trace file utilizes Battlefield 2 and we play the Daqing Oilfield map in both single and multiplayer mode.
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Gary Key - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
It did in this case, we actually put some thought into it this time. LOL....
JKing76 - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
Hey Gary -- mATX roundup?Gary Key - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
This Friday you will have part one up, finally, and then it will be followed by four or five sections over the next four weeks. We will cover everything from cases to keyboards, HD-DVD or Blu-ray, 8600GT or 2600XT, etc, etc. It turns out not just to be about motherboards this time, but the entire system. ;)TA152H - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
Gary,Have you considered reviewing any of the old IBM type keyboards? They don't make them anymore, or so most people believe, so they sell for a ton of money on eBay. But, there is a place that says they sell the exact type of keyboard, with the real feedback, and click. I haven't tried one, because I don't use a regular keyboard (they don't make the natural style), but since most people still do, you might want to contact these folks and see what they have. That type of feel is so much better, and I'd buy one instead of this Microsoft crap except for the layout. It's hard to go back to a regular keyboard after you get used to a natural one :( .
Here is the link if you are interested - http://www.pckeyboard.com">http://www.pckeyboard.com .
I'm guessing they'd be really interested in you reviewing their products, and for people that use normal keyboards, if they are what they say they are, it would be a very useful review. I surely miss those clicky keyboards, I think a lot of people do.
TA152H - Monday, July 9, 2007 - link
Gary,I have a question for you after reading how much you like this drive. Would you actually use one? I have had nothing but trouble with Samsung drives, and from your opening paragraph you have too. They apparently were junk, and their very low ratings for how long they expect the drive to last don't exactly instill confidence. So, you've got a really high opinion on a drive that could be real junk, since I think most people would favor reliability over just about anything else. Do you know more than you said in this article about reliability? Have you guys been having more success lately with Samsung drives? Samsung normally makes really good products, despite their horrible hard disks of the past, so I'm wondering if I should give them another shot. Now that Seagate bought "Crashtor", their quality is liable to go down for a while.
One thing that's in their favor is the low heat. Low heat tends to make things more reliable. But then, their own ratings aren't very good. Seagate's don't last only five years. I don't know how long they last, they always outlive their useful lives even if they are used all the time.
yehuda - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
Maybe it just me, but I wasn't overly impressed with the Samsung P120 that I bought last year. Back then I was in the market for a quiet drive, and the choice toward Samsung came naturally to me with all the hype that surrounded it. I recall that everywhere I turned I'd hear Samsung drives are the quietest.Unfortunately, the one I got (SP2014N with a nidec motor) fell behind my expectations. It had a louder and less pleasant idle noise than the Hitachi 7K80 drive it was meant to replace and also vibrated a lot and had an annoying high-pitched whine. As a point of reference, my ongoing experience with Western Digital WD1600AAJS has been far more positive.
TA152H - Wednesday, July 11, 2007 - link
One of the drives I bought had a terrible whining too. I just threw the thing out. I couldn't stand it and my cat threatened to leave me if I didn't address it. My drives were 5400 RPM, so I didn't have the vibration problems, but that whining was enough to make me scream. And I almost lost my cat over it.goinginstyle - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
I have two P120s, one is extremely quiet, more so than the WD1600AAJS, the other likes to whistle at times for lack of better words. I picked up one of these T166 500GB drives and have been impressed with it except for the vibration issue that was noted, four rubber grommets later and that was solved. Glad to see a Samsung review finally by the way. :)Gary Key - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
We bought two of these drives (we always buy at least one review sample to compare to the drives provided by the suppliers, which in this case Samsung did not) for the review about three months back. Since that time we have had both drives running practically 24/7 in a variety of cases, most with minimal cooling, without issue. This testing is for our m-ATX roundup as this drive will be our recommendation in a low cost HTPC setup. After the first month without any issues, I personally bought a couple of the drives to use in personal systems, once again no issues to date and this includes my work machine.
As much as we like the drive, we still cross our fingers and say a couple of prayers when checking on the test systems. The main reason, I had some horrible experiences in the past with Samsung, to the point that it was very difficult to say yes when asked to review their drives as I just expected something to go wrong with them if I ended up saying something positive. ;) So far, they have proved me wrong and from reports from other websites, and people like Eugene at Storage Review, this drive series is a winner to date. This does not mean you might not get a bad drive, it happens, but it appears the DeathStar type failures Samsung has had in the past is gone now. I am still a little apprehensive but so far so good, in fact, we had a couple of Seagates and WD drives fail here lately so nobody is immune.
TA152H - Tuesday, July 10, 2007 - link
Thanks for your response.I had similar problems with them, but I was stubborn and kept buying more because I liked Samsung as a company. Also, they made 5400 RPM drives, which is what I was after since I prefered the low power use and less heat to the extra performance. At the time, they were about the only game in town at those sizes, and I had a strong preference for the 5400 RPM. So, I kept trying different models, and they all sucked. Now I just buy the notebook drives and use a small adapter for it. They are expensive though for the capacity, but it does work well.
I'm going to try them again at some point too, because I think it's a good company overall and they will get things right. Hopefully they already have.