Samsung Spinpoint HD501LJ HDD

The HD501LJ is a part of Samsung's T166 series of hard drives. It's a 500 GB,

7200 rpm drive that can be used in desktops or media center PCs. The drive we

received had 16 MB buffer memory and supported the SATA II interface, which

enables it to achieve up to 3 Gbps throughput. Two highlights of the drive are

'Noise Guard' and 'Silentseek' technologies, which help the drive in

considerably reducing its noise level.

We tested the HDD on an AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual Core machine with 1 GB of RAM.

For evaluating the performance we ran HD Tach on the drive. The drive gave a

random access time of 14 ms, which is good and it also doesn't load the CPU too

much, utilizating only 3% of its power. The average read time clocked by the

drive was 67 MB/s. All these scores were better than some of the earlier drives

of the same specs that we've reviewed, like the Maxtor Diamondmax 11 (reviewed

in May 2006). We then ran another benchmark on the drive called HD Tune. In

this, it achieved an average transfer rate of 64 MB/s, a maximum of 81 MB/s .

This was done keeping the CPU utilization under control at only 2% . This

benchmark also resulted in an access time of 14 ms. The maximum 'Burst Speed'

rate delivered by the drive was 234 MB/s with the HDTach benchmark. Lastly, did

a file write test on the drive using the PCMark's HDD benchmark. The drive was

able to achieve file writing speed of 80 MB/s.

Bottomline: Considering the drive's performance, it's a

good option for desktops.