Hard Drives: Two Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ
When we carried over the drives from a previous build to the March High-End system, a few readers let us know how flawed the selection was. They were correct in their assessment, as our own Patrick Schmid had already proven the superiority of Samsung’s newer F1 drives. Unlike the graphics card debate, performance superiority wasn’t even debatable, and we admitted our mistake.
Our only real problem in selecting a pair of Spinpoint F1 drives for the new build was that, at $180 each, a pair of the one-terabyte models Patrick had tested would have put us “over budget”. By comparison, the 750 GB Spinpoint F1 when equipped with the same 32 MB cache is a relative bargain at $120 per unit.
Though both models use the same components and Samsung rates at the same 8.9 ms average seek and 4.17 ms average latency, we can’t be sure the performance will be the same. Methods to reduce drive capacity by less than the capacity of a platter include disabling one side of a platter or blocking off the inner sectors of all platters. The first method could result in slower average reads, while the second could result in faster average reads. Yet with so much of its reputation relying on the entire Spinpoint F1 series, we have a fair amount of confidence that Samsung won’t let us down on overall performance.
Optical Drive: TSST SH-203B
We’re no longer recommending the SH-203B from Toshiba/Samsung Storage Technologies in new builds simply because it’s an older model with limited availability, yet its performance is still good enough to match our latest system. We’ve carried this one through a few builds already, and were hoping to replace it with one of the recent low-cost Blu-Ray reader DVD writer combo drives, except that we had already reached our budget limit.
