Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Samsung SpinPoint SV6004H 60GB Email This Print This View My Personal Library Heavy Gear January 2002 • Vol.2 Issue 1 Page(s) 31 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Samsung SpinPoint SV6004H 60GB Nothing should shock me by now. Pentium 4 systems are selling for less than $1,300. 256MB of DDR SDRAM goes for less than $50 now. Even flash memory cards are in serious danger of becoming Secret Santa gifts. And yet, Samsung's SpinPoint SV6004H—the first 60GB hard drive I've seen selling for $127—startled me out of an otherwise torpid afternoon. It's not that 60GB or $127 are milestones in any way, but come on. This 5,400rpm EIDE hard drive costs just over two bucks a gig. So what's the bad news? Not much, actually. The SV6004H's 512KB cache buffer is pretty small compared to current desktop drives' typical 2MB to 8MB, but that's about it. The good news is the SV6004H's non-operating, 2ms shock tolerance of 300G and MTBF of 500,000 hours. It also has Samsung's NoiseGuard and SilentSeek technologies for a 3.2dB seek rating, and the company's ImpacGuard system to avoid head slap. All indicate a quiet, reliable drive. We installed our test unit in a 600MHz Pentium III system with 128MB of SDRAM, Windows Me, and a HighPoint DMA/100 EIDE controller. It was generally faster than the 30GB SpinPoint SV3002H we reviewed earlier, giving us acceptable performance. Under HD Tach 2.61, this SpinPoint read 24.9MBps on average and wrote an average of 16MBps. Its maximum data transfer rates look OK, too, at 32.3MBps for reading and 25.6MBps for writing. Its 14.3ms random access time is also fair. That's enough detachment: All are great figures for a $127, 60GB drive. Samsung admits that its earlier hard drives haven't been terribly reliable. Even its product representative said that one of the older drives expired noisily after a total lifespan of five hours, albeit five hours spent playing Unreal Tournament. However, Samsung says its new manufacturing processes are state-of-the-art, and its new hard drives are built to last. We can't test that claim, but the latest SpinPoints look good so far. by Marty Sems SpinPoint SV6004H 60GB $127 Samsung (800) 726-7864 (201) 229-4000 http://www.samsunghdd.com  User Reviews Be the first to write a review of this product Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.