I've seen these starting to show up here in Sweden (In stock in 6 stores). Does anybody know anything about them?
It must have been a year since I heard that Samsung would go for 133 x 3 HD's, maybe they're finally showing up?

Edit: Changed title.

SpinPoint T HD400LJ
"...a drive that is so quiet, YOU WON'T EVEN KNOW IT IS THERE." Can't wait the review!

Haha, how could I miss that? I checked their site but didn't see any.
I'll edit the title.

The 300GB IDE model seems like the only one available so far, just checked Germany. One more platter and 50 GB more than the 250 GB model, I guess I'll wait for the 400 GB version.

Why IDE? Give me SATA. After using SATA cables I'll never go back to IDE.

/mattek

Good news. Up until now only seagate was the only viable alternative for high capacity hard drives but they have this annoying self diagnostic sound. SpinPoint might cure that. I'd like to see a 400Gb SATA spinpoint sold at a reasonable price. Unfortunately even 250Gb SATA spinpoint is nowhere to be found in US, I fear it will be even worse with the new models.

I've seen a review which clamed the new 400GB 16MB cache Western Digital HDD was supposed to be pretty quick and quiet.

Anyone here had a look at one of those?

i need this

Still only 300 GB here in Sweden, both internal and external though.

400 GB have showed up in Germany, both IDE and SATA.

Still no reviews?

Here's a review from Ixbt (russian), and one from THG (weellll.... ).

Slow and low noise they say. I don't know if the performance have to do with the platter density.

Ixbt repports the older 200 GB version as slower than the 250 GB. Will it be the same with the 400 GB being the faster one? We'll see, just speculating here.

RE: THG Performance analysis.

Like most experienced IT Nerds/Engineers I take everything THG say with a handfull of salt.

The drives they tested might very well be early Firmware that works but very slowly, I have witnessed this several times before in reviews.

I will wait for another review before beleiving the drives are that slow.

For Samsung to have got a 300GB drive, they either need 2 x 150GB Platter (which they dont have, 3 * 100GB Platters (likely), 3 133GB Platters that are "short" i.e. they dont use all of the space on the platter, but what they do use is 133GB density, or 3 * 133GB Platters and only use 5 heads AND slightly shorter platters.

3 * 100GB Platters are likely as for the P120 series they are already manufacturing 100GB for the 200GB model.

The 400GB Model is the one to buy, it will be faster, and WONT be any noisier than the 300GB model.


Andy

Just been browsing for HDD's, and I spotted the 400GB SATA Samsung in stock at OC UK for £30 less than the Seagate.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ ... _SATA.html

I know this thread has not been touched since February, but I would like to ressurect it in the hope that someone has a 400GB Samsung HD400LJ and can give their experiences of that drive.

I dont need a drive right now, but I will need one at some point in the future and this drive is on my short list.

I refuse to touch anything made by Maxtor, WD, or Hitachi, so Samsung or Seagate are my choices.

My list of drives is in my Sig, I currently have about 40GB of spare space, but that will change as I dont have everything backed up.

The chances are that I will replace my 200GB 7200.7 SATA, its not the noisiest, thats the 300GB 7200.8 SATA, the point is that I will gain 200GB of space, and not gain another drive (I have 4). 3 of my drives spend most of their time idling anyway, and my boot drive is (arguably) the quietest of the 4 drives.


Andy

Im bumping this thread.

Someone on the SPCR forums must have one of these drives.


Andy

I'm waiting too, Andy. Not sure I'll be able to afford to shell out for the 400gig, but I'd like a respected opinion on the drive to compare to the 300 - maybe it would be worth it!

Haven't found the 400 available in Canada though, yet.

I have the 300GB model. But I didn't do a thorough analysis of the accoustics. It's in my file server which is not quiet but sits in my laundry room behind closed doors. I did plug it in before putting it in my server to have a quick listen. Definitly not as quite as my P80. The idles were a bit more harsh. I didn't load it up so I can't comment on the seeks. Maybe I'll have to pull it out again sometime and have a good listen to it.

According to the figures on Samsung’s website and to subjective reports, these are noisier than the P120s. As for performance, the specs look almost identical on paper, with the 400GB having a slightly higher density (133 v 125) but not supporting NCQ.
As for the Tomshardware review, did it state that it was using beta firmware or is that speculation! It does show an unusually poor performance considering its specs though.

Any chance of running DiskBench on the drive so that we can get an idea of the transfer rate? I have a P120 250GB SATA drive that we can compare it against. Try running it on the fastest and slowest partitions that it has, assuming that it has multiple partitions.

Samsung drives seem to get a little quieter after 1-2 weeks of usage, mine did.

Billy you might very well find that the T range is only a little louder than the P range, and thats due to the extra platter, I would imagine the seeks are still pleasant as the platter density is the same.

Having thought about this for a while, Samsung might have a new range on their way, as everyone else has 160-188GB platters. A perpendicular samsung with 3 platters would a a good choice, has anyone heard anything from Samsung about larger capacity drives.


Andy

Had my Samsung HD401LJ delivered this morning. Pics here http://idlenoise.ifrance.com/recordings/pictures/
I'm going to do a few noise recording tests and compare it with a SP2504C. Short performance tests too

Fantastic, I will look forward to your findings.

I am guessing that this drive will get a little quieter over the next 2 weeks, like all of the other Samsungs seem to do.


Andy

Thanks Alfred - I am looking forward to your findings!

I have it in my Linux server. So DskBench won't work. It's a linux partition too so I can't just plug it into a windows machine. Hopefully Alfred's tests will be more helpful.

I've uploaded some benchmark results on http://idlenoise.ifrance.com/benchmarks/
Test platform is an Asus A8N-SLi motherboard, X2 2.0 GHz (3800+) cpu overclocked at 2.6 GHz (~5000+); using nVidia nForce4 for IDE and SATA2 connections.

As you can see, the HD401LJ performs very well; slightly above SP2514N. This is a confirmation that HD300LD/LJ gets bad benchmark results (see online reviews) because it only uses 100 GB out of each 133 GB platter; a similar pattern as SP2004C vs SP2504C.

The temperatures you see on my HDtune screen captures are what I got after about 2 hours running all the benchmarks; both drives were put in Nexus Drive-a-Way enclosures. The case doesn't give any significant airflow around these enclosures, and it's a very hot summer day today in Brussels (32°C ambient when benchmarking), so these temps give us some indication about how cool these Samsung drives are when running disk-intensive tasks for a long time. Now I'm finished with the benchmarks, the SP2514N has stabilized at 43°C and the HD401LJ at 45°C; all temps reported by SMART feature.

AAM was disabled on both drives for running the benchmarks.
Enabling AAM in FTool provides about the same, unspectacular improvement in seek noises for both drives; anyway both idle & seek noise are very low on these drives.

I'll have to wait for a quieter environment (= a sleepless night ) to record idle and seek noises from both drives. I was surprised when plugging in the HD401LJ as it seemed easily as quiet or even a little quieter than any of my P120 series, both in idle and seek, while official Samsung dB/A values gives lower idle for the 2-platter. My SP2514N isn't having any noise problem (I've got 6 P120 drives actually, providing enough comparison points); so maybe I've been granted a cherry-picked HD401LJ, or maybe they're even better than what the specs suggest. My brand-new WD3200KS ? Beaten hands down...

alfred,

those access times are rather slow for AAM disabled drives, you should be getting ~14.X instead. I suggest you check your setup/benches (nVidia IDE/Sata drivers at work?) again.

and if you do enable AAM, mind finding out the access times for both drives?


Oh, and it appears your SP2514N is running at the default ATA100 interface. You might want to try using Samsung's utility (this I believe) to set it to ATA133, since nForce4 does support ATA133.

Well I'm no benchmarks specialist but I think Samsung drives usually get additional 1ms or 2ms in access time tests. Figures shown on c't w2benchw for example seem about in-line with online reviews. Enabling AAM on Samsung drives usually doesn't improve the results a lot.

I'm not gonna try to better any benchmark since it's not my main goal; I just did a quick check that the HD401LJ wasn't underperforming as the HD300 in some reviews I read a few months ago.

By the way if I've got something to improve I should focus on learning english, shouldn't I ?

Non! Votre anglais est très bien! Merci pour l'information jusqu'ici. (Peut-être je devrais améliorer mon Français!)

Anyways, I'm interested in hearing idle/seek noise if you do get around to recording it - but it sounds like the 400gig drive might be the way to go. It's starting to trickle into Canada, and the price isn't outrageous thus far. I'll have to keep an eye on it.

any reason u wouldn't go with the 500GB WD caviar if your looking for a quiet, high capacity drive now?
or are they significantly more expensive?

chdude3 > thanks.. nevertheless you managed to discover that my native language is french and not dutch (like about half of belgian people) By the way, your french is excellent. I'll try to make a recording asap, this should give a first look until we hopefully get the drive properly reviewed by the SPCR staff.

mb2 > I bought and tested a WD3200KS monday, see http://idlenoise.ifrance.com/recordings/
It has a low idle noise too, but I vastly prefer the idle noise signature of the Samsungs. I'm not selling the WD however, it's still very good for the capacity.

My recording of the HD401LJ is available on http://idlenoise.ifrance.com/recordings/

When you first compare both Samsung drives recordings, you may think there's more mid-high freqs presence in the HD401LJ recording compared to the SP2504C; however there is not. What's different is that the low freqs presence is lower for the HD401LJ; mid-high freqs are about the same level and signature. So when you switch from SP2504C to HD401LJ, the low freqs energy is reduced and subjectively you hear mid-high freqs higher : the "overall tone" moves higher in frequency, but actually not in amplitude (I checked this on graphs).

I always had the feeling that idle noise was lowered from P80 to P120; I now discover the same improvement here from P120 to T133.

Seek noise has been improved too on the HD401LJ, compared to P120; it's muted way better, but tends to result in an additive (related to idle) noise signature that is more on mid-high frequencies rather than low-mid freqs as for the P120.

These excellent first findings should be moderated as I have no idea if the HD401LJ will suffer from as high a sample variance as the P120 seemed to have, according to multiple posts. Only thing I can say is that I didn't suffer from this sample variance, all of my six P120 having very similar noise signatures and noise levels.

My new HD400LD has arrived from OCUK

Compared to my suspended p80 and p120 drives which I only ever hear the seeks off I agree with Alfred that they are slightly muted on this newer model.

Temp wise I noticed it runs a few degree's C cooler in open air than my Maxtor DM+9 and 7200.7

Im happy with it initially and havent added AAM yet

Need to get it suspended too ASAP

is it just me or does the pcb look el'cheapo?