SR's 250 GB Drive Roundup

Introduction When StorageReview launched back in 1998, we made a conscious decision to generally review what we coined as "flagship" drives, the largest hard drive in a given family. In turn, a "family" consisted of a drives that featured identical specs; only capacity differed through the use of a varying number of platters and/or platter sides. These platters themselves, however, featured the same areal density. Why such an arbitrary decision? In the good old days, new families (in other words, new densities) hit the market as often as every four months! Reviewing more than one representative drive from a family while addressing products from all major manufacturers proved too daunting a task. Balancing timeliness and breadth of coverage required that SR address just one product from each family. Secondly, not all drives from all manufacturers were available at matching capacities. If manufacturer A offered 40-, 30-, and 20-gigabyte drives while manufacturer B presented products of 30 and 25 gigabytes with C offering 40-, 35-, and 25-gigabyte units, then which capacities would be "fair" to review? Always sticking with the largest drive allowed SR a clearly defined, impartial method to choose evaluation units.

Finally, drives within a given family differed only in capacity. While capacity can exert a slight effect on high-level performance (in the past, informal tests have suggested that a doubling of capacity results in a performance increase of about 7% due to lessened actuator seek distances), it was easily argued that a flagship drive's performance results consistently translated downward to smaller members within the same generation.

Times have changed

This system worked quite well in the early years. More recently, however, the traditional definition of a drive family has fragmented. Though drives may all fall under the same "family" as specified by a manufacturer, in reality these units could feature differing densities, seek times, and buffer sizes. The rationale that "all drives within a given family perform similarly" has lost ground.

Further, some manufacturers often choose to sit out in pushing the bleeding edge of the capacity envelope and instead choose to devote resources to bringing more practical (and higher-volume) products to the market. A recent example rests with Samsung's 250-gigabyte SpinPoint P120. A modest two platter design, the flagship 250 GB SpinPoint was forced to go head-to-head with 500 GB monsters from Hitachi and Seagate (not to mention WD's slightly smaller but no less formidable Caviar WD4000). Our standalone review of the drive thus presented a Samsung unit that sometimes lagged competing drives by considerable margins. The other drives, however, enjoyed a capacity advantage significant enough to impact performance measures. Inversely, we praised the SpinPoint's low noise and power levels... but the Samsung was a two-platter design going up against drives incorporating up to five platters.

Lastly, advancements in areal density (and thus capacities and families) have also dramatically slowed in recent years. As a result, the industry now enjoys the "luxury" of windows of up to a year or more between product refreshes. This permits closer looks at more than one product from each firm's lines. While reviewing all drives from each family remains out of the realm of practicality, combining our traditional approach of individually reviewing each family's flagship with following articles that examine units catering to popular capacity points is a realistic goal.

Hence, we are pleased to be able to present our first ever look at a roundup of smaller, wallet-friendly offerings. Let us move on to StorageReview's 250 gigabyte drive roundup!