Samsung SpinPoint P120S 2504C
Current Price: $85.00+ S&H
Stephen Cooper, April 16th, 2006
..:: Benchmarking System Setup ::..
Intel Pentium D 820 800MHz FSB LGA 775
Foxconn 955X7AA-8EKRS2
1GB DDR-II 667MHz Patriot
250GB Maxtor MaxLine III HDD
250GB Samsung SP2504C
NVIDIA 6 Series - 6800 GT w/Latest Drivers
Windows XP Professional (SP2, DirectX 9.0c).
..:: HD Tach 3.0.1.0 ::..
The benchmark that we’ll be utilizing today to evaluate the comparative performance of Samsung's SP2504C is HD Tach 3.0.1.0. This is the latest and greatest generation of HD Tach, and serves as a superb demonstration of a drive’s capabilities. In order to examine the performance capabilities of the SP2504C, we’re going to place it against Maxtor’s MaxLine III 250GB. This Maxtor drive is a tad on the older side, and runs off of the original SATA150 specification. This is an excellent performance oriented product, equipped with a 16MB buffer.
If you’re already familiar with the HD Tach benchmarking utility, you’ll know that it allows for both quick and long tests. The quick bench covers the drive in 8MB zones, whereas the long bench utilizes 32MB zones. For our comparison purposes, we’re going to cover the results obtained from both of these quick and long benchmarks.
The first of these two tests that we’ll be discussing are the results obtained through the quick bench. The Maxtor 250GB MaxLine III displays typical SATA150 performance. The maximum burst speed comes in at 134.2MB/s, not too far from the specification maximum of 150MB/s. It’s a rare day that you’ll ever see a drive reach the theoretical maximum provided by the specifications, but this drive clearly performs quite well in this respect.
The random access time for the Maxtor drive came in at 14.7ms, while the CPU results showed a 3% utilization rate. This is a typical utilization rate, though with this drive I was hoping for something slightly better on the utilization front. The average read across the entire drive came out to 47.0MB/s, again a solid result.
Now, let’s see what the SATA300 Samsung SP2504C is capable of. In terms of the maximum burst rate, the SP2504C was able to eclipse the 150MB/s threshold of the SATA150 specification, but wasn’t able to come anywhere near the theoretical maximum of 300MB/s. The SP2504C was able to handle a maximum rate of 176.9MB/s, or roughly 43MB/s more than the Maxtor. Clearly, there is a solid gain in the maximum burst rate between specifications, but as is with the SP2504C, there is room for improvement.
In terms of the random access time, we see the SP2504C again eclipsing the Maxtor by a slight margin. Here, the SP2504C registers an access time of 13.8ms, nearly a ms faster than the Maxtor. CPU utilization falls to a mere 1% for the SP2504C versus 3% for the Maxtor, and the average read speed across the drive rises to 62.1MB/s. This is a 32% jump in average read speed.
Now, let’s see if anything changes as we take a look at the results obtained during the long bench. For the Maxtor, the burst rate remains relatively unchanged, as one would expect, at 135.5MB/s. The random access time also remains unchanged at 16.0ms. On the other hand, we see the CPU utilization rate fall to 1% from the 3% rate in the quick bench, and the average read speed across the drive jumps slightly to 47.8MB/s.
The SP2504C sees a marginal gain in the burst rate, rising to a solid 182.5MB/s. The random access time for the long bench was slightly improved at 13.7ms, but the CPU utilization rate jumped greatly from the quick bench. Now we’re seeing a 4% utilization rate versus the 1% we found in the quick bench. Factoring in the +/- 2% error margin, we see both the Maxtor and Samsung registering around 2% utilization rates on average. The average read speed also saw a slight decline down to 61.7MB/s, but again easily surpass the Maxtor.
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