Is it true that the 200GB is utilising <125GB/platter? From benchmarks posted by some owners here, it really seems that way. In fact, read speed is only slightly faster than the P80 series. I haven't seen this officially confirmed. But since Samsung used a mix of 60 and 80 GB platters on the P80 se...

kesv, would it explain the different transfer rates and curves produced by my 'identical' drives? Yes, because the variable density of the platters means that their dense areas are not neccesarily in the same places. EDIT: Found the original article about the formatting used by Samsung: http://www....

I assume that both models have the same data density, with the 200 gig being short stroked. Not so. AFAIK Samsung uses a variable density formatting technique that can compensate for small manufacturing errors in some regions of the platter. That also means that they can actually decide based on qu...

So my question is, is there a way to turn a hard drive on or off without taking my computer apart every single time? Harddrives can be made to spin down (ie. turn themselves off) when not used. Any reasonable power management utility should offer some settings for this. I'm using this method with m...

AFAIK, PSUs can only do with what they are given; it might be more beneficial to try and clean up what's coming out of the wall than to see which PSU is producing the cleanest DC. I'll second this. At the very least use a surge protector. Or if you have money to spend, invest in a quality UPS. Any ...

Hello, I have vibration from my Nexus XP-3200 CPU fan. Nexus is supposed to a very quiet fan. Therefore I need something that will reduce this vibration noise or upgrade the fan or buy a different CPU heatsink and fan. The problem with that particular Nexus is that it uses a 70mm fan. So there is a...

perplex wrote:Does anyone know which of these two PSUs has the "cleanest" power? (the voltage regulation and ripple).

Both are known as high quality PSUs. My question would be, why do you think there will be a significant difference ?

My priorities are: 1. Silence 2. Cost 3. Speed Since you want to have it low cost, I'll suggest this for a hsf: http://www.glacialtech.com/pdf/Igloo%202470%20Light.pdf Still, that costs around 15EUR here, so it's more expensive than you said you wanted to spend. I doubt you will find anything bette...

I'm not sure what heat sink to get, if any. I'd be willing to pay maybe $5-$10 for one, at most. This is a budget system, after all. It seems that most of the heat sinks I've looked at are only for Athlon 64 and not Socket A (or whatever a Sempron is--I am confused with AMD stuff). You can't have i...

Noise reduction is my main priority, especially on the P4 machine, which I use for music recording. Ideally I'd like them all to be silent, but I don't want to fry the CPUs either. I'm willing to spend more on the P4 machine, but would like to keep the price down on the two eMachines. You don't giv...

So, megahertz for megahertz, is a Duron comparable to or faster than a Pentium III? It's roughly in the same performance class. However the Duron had a smaller cache (iirc). This means it probably looses to a P3 on some benchmarks. I'm not familiar with the mobile version of Duron, can't comment on...

My only concern now is the airflow and the temp inside the case. Would another 120mm nexus fan in front (setup to exhaust the air outside) make a difference? Since all the hot air accumulates in top of case. It might help some, but most cases are built to suck air from bottom front and exhaust it f...

As most graphics card are CPU-limited, what sort of card should I go for? I was thinking of an nVidia 6600 GT 256MB, but would that just be pearls inside a swine? You probably mean top of the line gfx-cards are CPU-limited ;) In any case you have to consider what you are planning to use the pc for ...

Hitachi's hard drives are based on IBM's deathstar drives so I don't recommend them. Oh. Come on. That comment is totally useless. First: While the 'deathstar' series (GXP75) had it's share of problems, since that time there have been 3 new families of drives from IBM/Hitachi (120GXP, 180GXP & 250K...

A plethora of HD utilities can be found on the free Ultimate Boot CD. Latest versions of the Ultimate Boot CD should also contain smartmontools http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ . This tool is a *nix style commandline tool, but pretty complete and can access most ATA and SCSI drives' SMART info...

Hi! I have two Seagate Barracudas (one 40GB IV, and one 160GB .7) in my compy, and I'm starting to get very annoyed at the fact that it seems that almost always one or the other is doing some form of check-up, probably related to SMART, making a lot of seeking noise. I don't think your problem is s...

for a bit of hilarity, try the mp3's they posted of drive noise recordings. i'm not sure how exactly you make a 128kbps mp3 sound so awful without deliberately re-encoding it a dozen times. For some additional fun compare the recordings for the Raptor and SP 1614N during activity. Even in their ove...

I was just wondering if anybody has ever heard of this happening? There is no reason it can't happen. If you only have a few fans it's going to be a pretty rare event, but consider those big computing centers with a great number of machines. They need to replace failed fans pretty regularly. That's...

What are abnormally high hardware ECC counts? My 1 year old 120GB Spinpoint has a raw value around 63 million. If you would get the same in one week or one month I guess that should worry you. The drive that failed had a count of some 400 million in just a few months. The ECC is part of the operati...

Just some bad sectors that the disk has since closed off? What does the disk show for reallocated sector count (SMART) ? Just a while ago I had to RMA a 160GB Spinpoint that died on me. It too showed similar symptoms before dying completely. The only indication from SMART that something was wrong, ...

Not sure is suspending 4 drives is feasible in a sonata. Currently all four are on the sonata sleds. You could use sorbothane as shown by Ralf Hutter: http://forums.silentpcreview.com/viewtopic.php?p=50197#50197 Still, 4 drives in a Sonata will be tight fit. Maybe you can get along with just 3, dro...

Big difference in noise level? I'm not chasing high performance, but why buy a slower one of there is virtually no difference? There is some difference: SR link It's really depends on the kind of use you are going to be putting the drive into. For your main system drive I recommend going with the P...

Edit: My current drive is a WD Caviar 60gb with 2mb buffer and I do not suffer any dvd, dvix, or xvid slow playback issues. So I'm wondering if 2mb might be good enough? It is for video playback. It falls under the category of reading a single file sequentially. Here having that extra cache won't h...

That previous post stating 6 megs doesn't make much of a difference because of increased file sizes is flat out wrong. Correction! What I said was: 'Not really enough to make a huge impact on seeks...' And file sizes have to do with the ordering of data blocks on the disk, so they have to do with t...

Well, I took the suggestions and went with it. Got an Antec 3000b and did the supension thing with bungee cord. Looks good so far, however have you checked the temperatures on those drives ? You do have a front fan and all, but with the drives being so large and all the cabling they require, I wond...

Oops, sorry. I used HD Tach. In their database this model should give something like 47 MB/s. I'm using Windows XP. I'm not an expert on W-XP, but generally if the result is lower than expected, there are a few possible reasons that come to mind. 1. Bad cable 2. Buggy ATA chipset on the motherboard...

Bigger cache = less seeks? That is what I would think. While technically correct, the difference is just 6MB of cache. Not really enough to make a huge impact on seeks these days, since the average data file sizes are going up all the time. Most operating systems use tens or even hundreds of megaby...

The 0812N (8MB) vs the 0802N (2MB); 1614N (8MB) vs the 1604N (2MB); etc. How do they compare noisewise? I am especially interested in seek noise. Why do you seem to think that the cache makes a difference to seek noise ? Drives with the same number of platters are mechanically the same. So it is ex...

That's worse than acaurora's Firewire HD (which is pretty good)! Isn't that very low? I would expect above 40 MB/s. It got 5 partitions, is that the reason for the slow speed? You don't specify what OS and program were used to obtain those numbers. Different benchmark programs would not produce com...

Does anyone have a suggestion on what I can do? Is my only solution a new case? If it is, are there any suggestions? I'm willing to spend up to $300 on a new case and mods, although I would prefer not having to do my own mods. I suppose you could look at an external driveunit case. I don't have per...