Samsung Spinpoint P80 SP1614C

Note: Since the publication of this review, this drive has been retested under Testbed4, a newer hardware/software/benchmark platform. Please see this article for updated results. This review remains for reference purposes only.

Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C Capacities Model Number Capacity SP0812C 80 GB SP1213C 120 GB SP1614C 160 GB Lowest Real-Time Price: Introduction In the eyes of high-volume system integrators as well as those of hardware enthusiasts, Korean conglomerate Samsung has never been as popularly regarded as competitors such as Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital. This may partly be attributed to the continued momentum enjoyed by the latter; it's undeniable that Samsung's channel distribution, however, lags far behind. StorageReview has suffered from the problem as well- Samsung has only sporadically worked with us. As a result, SR's coverage of the firm's products has not been as comprehensive as those from other manufacturers.

Recently, however, the manufacturer's marketing apparatus seems to have undergone an overhaul of sorts. While still not as pervasive in local superstores as the major American manufacturers, the firm now demonstrates more willingness to work with publications such as StorageReview to get its products in the light.

Over the past couple years, Samsung has enjoyed extended goodwill from the enthusiast community by remaining the sole manufacturer to retain an across-the-board three-year warranty on all of its ATA drives even as competitors retreated to one-year protection on many models. Remember, however, that these reductions do not necessarily imply a sudden fall in build quality; indeed, many enthusiasts fail to grasp the immediate accounting benefit through the decrease of paper liability that results independently of actual warranty claims. Last summer, Seagate finally reversed the trend by returning not just to three-year protection but instead extending the five-year warranty enjoyed by its enterprise line across the board to all consumer-oriented products. While there have been some whispers that Samsung is preparing to respond with its own extension, at the time of this writing, the firm backs all its drives with a standard three-year warranty.

The SpinPoint P80 is Samsung's current performance-oriented 7200 RPM drive line. Though firms such as Seagate and Maxtor have moved to 100 GB/platter products, Samsung, like Hitachi and Western Digital, still rests at the long-standing 80 GB/platter mark. Samsung joins Seagate in topping out with a two-platter design rather than setting its sights against the three-or-more-disk flagships offered by Hitachi, Maxtor, and WD. An 8.9 millisecond seek time and an eight-megabyte buffer round out the drive's vitals.

Like other firms, Samsung ships the P80 exclusively with fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) motors. When contrasted with traditional ball bearing offerings, FDB motors deliver quieter idle operation as well as purportedly increasing shock resistance.

The unit evaluated in this review is the SATA-based SpinPoint SP1614C. A parallel ATA unit, the SP1614N, was reviewed earlier this year. Interestingly, though the SP1614C is a PATA design that features a bridged SATA interface, the drive lacks the standard 4-pin molex-style connect and instead exclusively relies on the newer 15-pin SATA-style interface.

With the P80, Samsung targets mid- to high-end desktop machines as well as light-duty servers that require moderate capacity combined with performance and quiet operation. In the following tests, the Samsung SpinPoint SP1614C is compared against the following drives for the following reasons:

MaXLine III	Current-generation competitor
Deskstar 7K400	Current-generation competitor
Caviar WD2500JD	Current-generation competitor
Barracuda 7200.7	Current-generation competitor