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Samsung SpinPoint MP0804H


Date
: 08/9/05 – 03:02:44 AM

Author
:

Category
: Storage

Page 1 : Index

Manufacturer
: Samsung Canada

Price
: $161.99 Canadian (TigerDirect) (I've seen $155.00 in Toronto)

Many of us are well aware that Samsung is one of the leading manufacturers in LCD monitors. However, their market doesn't just end there! Today, we get to feature our first hard drive from Samsung. This
SpinPoint
drive is actually one of many hard drives Samsung has to offer!

The Samsung SpinPoint M40 series is a family of 2.5" hard drives that boast 8 MB cache and 5400 RPM speeds! If your laptop is in need of some speed upgrades, or if you just need massive amounts of storage on the go, keep reading to see how well this drive performs in a 2.5" USB 2.0 external case and as the primary drive in a laptop!

Page 2 : Packaging

Samsung offers this hard drive as an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) component. Unlike any of their other products, this one arrived at my place in a simple anti-static bag.

Pulling out the drive, we can easily see the entire unit. There really isn't much to report.

There you have it, in a very small amount of space, we've covered everything that comes with the MP0804H!

Page 3 : Specifications

The SpinPoint M40 boasts several interesting features geared towards creating a silent hard drive for your laptop.

With the exception of the first point, all the rest sound like different forms of technology to ensure a smooth and silent operation.

Now for the technical details…

Now that we know what we're rolling with, we can get started on some tests!

Page 4 : Installation

Since this drive was OEM, there's no official manual. A quick search on Samsung's website brings us to this two page guide. We'll cover two different installation procedures for your convenience.

For our first set of tests, we'll need to have the MP0804H setup in an external enclosure. While I originally thought I would only be using the 2.5" drive in my laptop, I figured it would be informative to show readers what this drive is capable of as an external storage solution. The end result, for a mere 20 dollars, I now have an external 2.5" hard drive case to make this review that much better :).

The Nspire case I bought requires me to set the jumper to master, done by default, and attach the unit head before sliding it into the casing.

Once the drive is in place, two screws need to be screwed in and the unit needs to be connected to the computer.

This installation procedure takes no more than 5 minutes!

If you're looking to install the MP0804H in a laptop, it's not too hard either. Starting with the bare unit, you'll need to refer to your laptop manual for finding the hard drive bays. Once you've located the hard drive, pull the cage out of your system, remove the screw holding it down, and swap hard drives. It's a pretty basic procedure that's hard to mess up.

The hard drive can only be secured in one direction to ensure the pins align with the motherboard, so if the screw holes don't line up, flip the drive around. Here are a few pictures of the completed process:

With the hard drive ready, we'll slide her back into the machine and boot to do a clean install. Just to note, if you plan on using the drive as a Slave, you'll need to readjust the jumper setting. The jumper layout is printed onto the hard drive label.

Page 5 : External Performance

We're going to kick off the benchmarks in the external section before we dive into the laptop results. Here are the specifications of the machine used for all external results:

Before you can begin using this drive as an external storage solution, you need to create the partitions and format the drive. Windows will automatically detect the hard drive inside the Nspire case.

However, it's up to you to do the rest.

Once that is taken care of, we can start our battery of tests. We'll start off with Sisoft Sandra, HD Tune, HD Tach and cap everything off with IoZone.

Sisoft Sandra File System Benchmark

No matter how you put it, the USB solution kicks the butt out of the network attached storage (NAS). This simply means, if you have only one drive, or if you don't mind walking around, the USB 2.0 is a better bet over NAS.

HD Tune

HD Tach

IoZone

The benchmark that really does all the testing is IoZone. Millions of read and writes done in one simple test, how nice!

We'll run through a quick Windows install and zip through some more tests.

Page 6 : Internal Performance

For our laptop tests, we'll be using the Acer Travelmate 290XVi. Nothing special but it will be sufficient for our needs. Here is a quick rundown of the specifications:

We'll run the exact same tests as when the drive was running in the external enclosure. Starting with Sisoft Sandra, we see the results in the graph below.

Sisoft Sandra File System Benchmark

While we move through HD Tach and HD Tune, we get similar results.

HD Tune

HD Tach

IoZone

The results are more or less steady and where we want them to be. The one thing I really noticed about the 5400 RPM hard drive was how much faster things loaded. Things were definitely sluggish with the original drive, and after a year with a 4200 RPM drive the lag was becoming more and more unbearable. With the 5400 MP0804 in place, the laptop was rejuvenated. No more lengthy delays in loading up drives with lots of thumbnails or copying data over from A to B. The crunching of data ceased much sooner than before.

Page 7 : Conclusion

The Samsung MP0804H has certainly gone through a lot and it shined in its tests. When used as an external unit, its faster than NAS units and has a lot more capacity than typical flash drives. As an internal drive, I felt an immediate rejuvenation in performance. When we're use to 7200 RPM drives as a bare minimum on desktops, the older 4200 RPM laptops can't cut it for performance. A 5400 is just a must. While a 1.5 year old 1.3 GHz Centrino is certainly not out of date for a laptop, but this upgrade from 4200 to 5400 certainly makes it work and feel like it's a lot newer.

The price range of a MP0804H is certainly reasonable. It sits at where all the other 80GB 8MB 5400 RPM drives are. If you wanted to upgrade to 7200 RPM, you can find products at the same price range of $155 CDN, but the only difference is that you'll get 40 GB instead of 80 GB capacity. Given the reputation Samsung has in the market, the MP0804H is certainly a drive you could pick up and use with confidence.

Advantages

With an external enclosure, makes moving large quantities of data fast and easy
Greatly improves operating system performance over older 4200 RPM drives

Disadvantages

Could be an expensive upgrade for older laptops
Larger than thumbdrives and CDs

Overclockers Online would like to thank Samsung Canada for lending us a sample for review.