Samsung Spinpoints - are they too slow for a fast system?

[imprator]

I am planning on building a fast PC shortly. I want it to be quiet as well as fast and am selecting components accordingly.

The Samsung Spinpoint T-series hard drives seem to be the quietest available, but they also seem to be pretty slow judging by the recent Tom's Hardware group test. This review reported that seek times were about 1 m/s slower than the fastest drives, but that transfer speeds were "quite high" at 78 mbps.

I don't really know how these numbers releate to real-world system speed. So my question is - if I use these drives will my system be noticeably slower in everyday use than if I use faster drives? Or will the difference be just a few percentage points and probably too small to notice?

Thanks.

 

[dawgma]

I would LOVE to know what is going on with these SpinPoints... I am also building a new machine and I want the fastest high capacity disks I can find.

The SpinPoint T166 DOMINATES the hardware charts for Read/Write performance and bandwidth... it is consistently at the top of the heap. The price/GB is one of the lowest out here. It looks too good to be true. Can someone explain where the catch is with these drives? Are they really not considered high performance, or what?

 

[tweebel]

For most harddrives of equal capacity, diameter and RPM you are unlikely to notice any difference in performance at all.
Noise and price are things that you will notice. A 10% slower Windows boot will most likely occur once a day while you might have to hear the drive for many hours every day.

If you really need lots of speed, you go the Raptor way, otherwise, just focus on noise, heat, warranty and price.

Btw, I've used a 160 GB Spinpoint which you couldn't hear, now i'm using a 250 GB Spinpoint which sometimes makes a bit of sound under heavy activity, but it is only audible when the room is completely quiet. For what I use the drive for (some gaming, video recoding, office apps etc.) it is plenty fast.

Don't know anything about the new T166 series though.

 

[1Tanker]

I am planning on building a fast PC shortly. I want it to be quiet as well as fast and am selecting components accordingly.

The Samsung Spinpoint T-series hard drives seem to be the quietest available, but they also seem to be pretty slow judging by the recent Tom's Hardware group test. This review reported that seek times were about 1 m/s slower than the fastest drives, but that transfer speeds were "quite high" at 78 mbps.

I don't really know how these numbers releate to real-world system speed. So my question is - if I use these drives will my system be noticeably slower in everyday use than if I use faster drives? Or will the difference be just a few percentage points and probably too small to notice?

Thanks.

I think they're great for a storage drive, but for an O/S drive, i like the Seagate 7200.10(16MB) or the Raptors.