The Hardware Behind Overdrive

Hard Drives: Samsung Spinpoint F

This is the first time we’ve worked with Samsung on an event, but the storage and memory specialist wanted to be sure they supported the Overdrive Overclocking Championship as much as possible. We received Samsung Spinpoint F 1 TB 3.5” SATA/300 hard drives, which provide more than enough capacity for the overclocking systems.

Technically, 20 GB to 30 GB of capacity would be sufficient for the event, but recent price drops make the terabyte hard drives more attractive than ever. Samsung’s Spinpoint F is still one of the fastest 3.5” desktop hard drives when it comes to throughput. Although newer drives like WD’s RAID Edition 3 provide quicker access time and better I/O performance, the 7,200 RPM Spinpoint F remains one of the most balanced hard drive choices for enthusiasts.

Also see:

• Samsung Ships Three Platter Terabyte Drive
• Three Samsung Terabyte Drives: Mainstream, Business or Eco?

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Super Writemaster SH-S222/223 Optical Drives

Samsung also provided us with SH-S222/223 DVD burners for our event. Although the optical drive doesn’t directly impact reaching high performance on overclocked systems, our contestants still need optical drives to install Windows Vista, and to deploy drivers and benchmarks to the test systems. The SH-S222 family utilizes the UltraATA interface and provides up to 22x DVD recording speed on DVD+R and DVD-R media, and up to 16x DVD recording speed on DVD+R double layer recordables. The 223 family is similar, but utilizes the SATA/150 interface.