Don't need a big hard drive? (Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD252HJ 250 GB)

Member Name: prosser1

Product:	Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD252HJ 250 GB
Date:	24/10/09 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Fast transfer speeds, quiet, great when it works

Disadvantages: Unreliable, had to be replaced

With the necessary "hard drive" pun out of the way:


INTRODUCTION

A hard drive? You may be wondering how knowing what hard drive to choose will benefit you, and you'd be surprised. Let me give you some examples:

- Buying an external hard drive case and an internal hard drive separately is usually a lot cheaper than buying one which has been put together for you. It also still comes with a warranty (in some cases 5 years!) and it's very easy to put together!

- Hard drives really aren't that hard to install into PCs, so if you need some extra space a £35 hard drive could save you buying a new computer for hundreds! Alternatively, by buying a hard drive and paying someone to fit it, you know your not getting a second hand one or being overcharged for a cheap drive.

- You might want to give a computer enthusiast one for Christmas!

Of course, if your looking at this review you might well know what a hard drive is and what it does, but for those who don't - a hard drive is the "backing storage" in a computer. It's what everything is saved to. They come in different sizes and all perform differently.

This particular hard drive is made by Samsung, who make many other things including hard drives, but have a good reputation. The SpinPoint series was, and still is, a favourite amongst enthusiasts.

Enough of an introduction, let's take a look at this drive.




SPECIFICATIONS

The model I'm reviewing today is the SpinPoint F1 HD252HJ, to be precise.

It has the following specifications:

* Capacity: 250GB
* Cache: 16MB
* Interface: SATA 3.0Gbps
* NCQ Compliant
* S.M.A.R.T. Compliant
* NoiseGuardTM & SilentSeekTM
* 3 year warranty

Features are all very well, but NCQ and S.M.A.R.T. Compliant? NoiseGuard? SilentSeek? Let me explain.

Firstly, it has a capacity of 250GB, which will be reduced to around 238GB after formatting. [If you're curious, this is because hard drive manufacturers say that 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes, while the Operating System measures 1MB as 1,048,576 bytes, so the drive appears smaller in the operating system]. 250GB isn't a huge capacity for a drive anymore - the HD252HJ is best used in either a computer for general family use which doesn't have a huge number of games or movies on it, or as a secondary storage drive for downloaded files, pictures, videos, and whatever else. With an average high resolution picture using up to 5MB of space, this 250GB drive would be enough for about 50,000 pictures; that's a lot of happy snapping!

It has a cache size of 16MB, which is larger than the normal 8MB found in this capacity and price range. The cache (pronounced "cash" normally, by the way!) is made of flash memory, and all the frequently accessed data is held here - that way, the hard drive doesn't have to spin up and find the data on the platter, so the cache is much faster, speeding up your computer.

The hard drive uses the latest interface, SATA 3Gbps. Most computers built in the last 4 years or so should be compatible with this interface, but if your computer isn't PCI controller cards which just plug in are available for as little as £5 - £10.

NCQ is Native Command Queueing, which is essentially jargon for the drive getting common sense. Without this, the drive would go and find data on the platter (hard drives access data by spinning a disk called a platter and moving an arm around to read it off the spinning platter) in the order which the computer requests it. However, this might mean going past data - for example, it would be like having to pick up three parcels, and going to the middle one, then the closest one, then the furthest away one, then back home. NCQ sorts that out and speeds up the drive in doing so.

S.M.A.R.T. is a feature which has been present on pretty much all, if not all, drives produced in the last few years and a lot further back than that. All this feature does is checks the drive is feeling OK and if it's not warns you. NoiseGuard and SilentSeek, unlike the two previous features, are found only on certain Samsung drives, and claim to reduce the sound the drive makes, particularly when spinning fast to find lots of data. I'm interested to see how well they work!




THE DRIVE

The hard drive was delivered in typical minimal Samsung packaging - once I'd removed all the bubble wrap and foamy peanuts from the plain cardboard box, there was just the hard drive in a clear plastic shell, along with some mounting screws. The drive itself has another bubblewrap sleeve, but the large amount of padding in the box protected the drive very well.

Once I'd installed the drive and ensured that S.M.A.R.T. was enabled, I installed Windows XP, and then used it for just over a year, as I felt reliability was a very important part of this review. The unfortunate fact is the market moves a long way in a year and while 250GB was reasonably big last year, it's quite small when compared to todays 1TB and even 2TB drives, which are 4 times and 8 times as large! For the purposes of this review, I'm going to break down the hard drive testing into a series of categories, as follows...

NOISE

The first thing I noticed was noise...or to be precise, the lack of! Whatever technology Samsung has used, it works. The drive is quiet, even when copying large files, and when my old Seagate gets going the sudden difference in noise is amazing!

9/10 for noise.

SPEED

In overall use, I found the drive to be noticeably faster, which I was really surprised about. After all, surely it's only a hard drive? However, games loaded faster, which was especially useful in multiplayer games as it meant I got a few seconds headstart! As well as general use, I ran some artificial tests - while the numbers are meaningless without context, and they're just numbers regardless with little meaning behind them, they show that the drive has read and write speeds (of data) at the top end rather than the lower end. These speeds were consistent across the whole hard drive, which is good to see.

8/10 for speed.

RELIABILITY

Ah, the first pitfall. After about 10 months of use, my first critcism of this Samsung drive - the S.M.A.R.T. feature warned me the hard drive had an error and told me to back up my data. I'd noticed my PC slowing down, especially when booting up, over a period of a few weeks, but had put it out my mind as one of those things. After downloading a drive health test, I found that some of the 'blocks' on the hard drive had gone bad. Luckily, S.M.A.R.T. warned me about this enough in advance to save everything vital off, but it was still very annoying having to get everything off the drive and send it back to Samsung. My replacement drive has been in use for a few months now and shows no signs of problems, so I'm hoping it'll stay that way.

I actually bought two Samsung Spinpoints at the same time, although one was a different model and capacity, but this too failed about a month and a half later, but again with time to get data off of the drive. With so many drives out there, I'm sure I must have just gotten unlucky, but I'd advise taking a close look on the net if you do think about buying a Samsung drive just to check there aren't lots of people with problems a year or a year and a half after they've bought it.

3/10 for reliability.

SUPPORT

The one good thing about the drive being unreliable was it gave me a chance to check out the Samsung support! As the drive comes with a 3 year warranty, it was still covered, so I opened a ticket on the Samsung website with my details and the drive serial number. I then received an email asking me to send it to a certain address, which I did - lucky I kept the original packaging! They tested it, confirmed there was a problem, and sent me out a reconditioned drive (they fix the broken ones by replacing or repairing the parts and then use them as RMA replacements, as do most hardware companies). The whole thing took just over a week, and one morning I was woken up by my phone ringing - DHL were checking I was in and they even gave me an hour delivery slot, which they met; very impressive!

An 8/10 for support, as Samsung were efficient and effective :)

PRICE

The price of the drive has come down rapidly since last year, as prices in general have fallen. The HD252HJ is available for a mere £35 with free delivery off Amazon at the time of writing - a real bargain! If you need more space, the very similar HDS502IJ with near identical specifications is available on Aria for £45. Similar 250GB hard drives are available slightly cheaper though - eBuyer sell a 250GB Maxtor for £28 + delivery, but I'd question whether the Maxtor can match the Samsung's excellent noise level.

6/10 for price.




FINAL WORD

It's a disappointment that I've had the reliability problems with the drive that I've had - if I was still on my first drive, I'm sure it would have got a 5 star rating and a definite recommendation. However, that's not the case. I still recommend the drive - it's fast and is very quiet, but I'd also recommend looking at other drives which may be more reliable and cheaper. If you do go for the Samsung HD252HJ, I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Summary: Good drive as long as it doesn't fail on you!

Processing/Quality:
Reliability:
Noise: