Samsung SATA 160GB drive SP1614C

The latest 160 GB Serial ATA has a spindle speed of 7200 rpm and 8 MB cache buffer. The drive is available with 80 GB capacity. The drive was tested on our standard test bed of P4 3 GHz with an Intel 865 motherboard having onboard SATA 

support, 512 MB DDR 400 dual channel RAM and onboard graphics. It scored 77.2 and 111.9 Winstone units in Business and CC Winstone 2001, which are benchmarks for business productivity and high-end/multimedia applications. Both of these are average scores. It managed to give 15.2 MB per sec in Business Disk Winmark, which is good, but couldn’t do as well in high-end disk Winmark, where the score was only 29.7 MB per sec. Both benchmarks measure the transfer rates incurred by the drive when running business and high-end/multimedia apps. The drive’s seek time came to 13.9 millisecs which is fine. In raw disk transfers, the drive starts at 60 MB per sec and as it moves towards the inner circles of the platters, it drops to 30 MB per sec. The drive’s per GB cost of Rs 69 is the lowest in the category of SATA drives we’ve tested so far. 

Siddharth Sharma