Samsung Spinpoint HD103SJ 1TB Hard Drive : Is it better than the competition?

Author's Rating:

Pros: Decent cost, good reliability, better performance than comparable drives.

Cons: Only 3 year warranty

The Bottom Line: 
The Samsung is faster than Hitachi at about the same price.  A solid performer for a data drive or even primary boot drive for general use.

Author's Review
I purchased a Samsung 1TB actually as a boot drive for my primary home PC.  The computer is used for general use: mostly word processing, web surfing & some gaming.


Background:
For much of this review, I will be comparing this drive to the Hitachi Deskstar 1TB drives I bought for my home server.  I have a much faster Western Digital Raptor, but these 2 drives (Samsung HD103SJ & Hitachi Deskstar) have nearly identical specs on paper, and as it turns out are about the same price as well.


Some terms I use in this review:
1TB = 1 TeraByte.  This is the drive's capacity.  You can purchase larger drives, but I didn't see the need for anything bigger for this computer.  If you do need more capacity, I'd recommend using multiple drives for redundancy in case a drive fails.

7200rpm = 7200 revolutions per minute.  This is the speed at which the drive can spin it's platters.  Very generally speaking, the higher this number, the faster the drive (and the more electricity it uses).  7200 rpm is very common.

SATA 2 = Serial Advanced Technology Attachment, revision 2, also referred to as SATA 3Gbit/s.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata).  This is the interface that the drive uses to connect to your PC.  Before upgrading, make sure that your PC supports SATA.


Installation:
Installation was very easy for me, but I've installed a lot of hard drives.  You basically just plug it in and go.  If you've never installed an internal hard drive before, I recommend doing a google search to learn how.


Reliability:
I've had this drive for about 5 months, and have had no problems with it whatsoever.  However, I have some strong opinions about hard drive reliability, which I already have discussed at length in another review (see link). 

Of the 4 Hitachi Deskstars I purchased at about the same time of this Samsung, 1 has already failed.  However, I only bought 1 Samsung drive as opposed to 4 Hitachi Deskstars.  Therefore Hitachi had 4 chances to give me a dud, so this is not really a fair comparison.

Based on reviews on Amazon & Newegg I gather that the Samsung Spinpoint drives have good reliability so far.  But I strongly believe that you should always have backup for any important data.  All hard drives fail, it's just a matter of when.


Samsung's Warranty:
Samsung has a 3 year warranty, the same as Western Digital, Hitachi & now Seagate.  I consider the warranty to be very important for a hard drive, so if you can find a comparable drive (from a known manufacturer) with a 5 year warranty I'd recommend giving it a look.  Unfortunately it appears that all the major hard drive manufacturers have dropped their warranty to only 3 years on most drives.


Performance:
The Samsung HD103SJ is a 1TB capacity, SATA II (3 Gbit/s), 7200RPM drive w/ a 32MB cache.  These are exactly the same specs for the Hitachi drive I reviewed earlier.  So I thought it would be interesting to compare the two drives using the same PC.  I ran the same speed test on this drive as for the Hitachi, and the results are below:

Drive Index : 118 MB/s (139 MB/s @ position 0% to 82 MB/s @ position 100%)
Random Access Time : 12.8ms

These are read results.  The first is an assessment of how quickly data is read from the drive in a semi-continuous basis (higher is better).  The second is an assessment of how long it takes for the drive to spin up & locate data (lower is better).

The Samsung is a bit faster than the Hitachi; about 7% faster average throughput and about 3% faster on seek.  Not a big difference, but since the drives are approximately the same price you might as well take the faster drive.

The Samsung is relatively quiet, about the same noise level as the Hitachi.  It runs a tad hotter than the Hitachi, but I don't think it runs particularly hot so this is not a big deal at all.

Power consumption is higher than the Hitachi at 4.9 W @ idle.  The Hitachi was 4.4 W @ idle.  The Western Digital "Green" drives use significantly less power than either (2.8W @ Idle) so if that's important to you I recommend the WD Green 1TB


Price:
The Samsung is a little more expensive than the Hitachi, but not by much; I'm seeing as little as a $5 difference from epinions stores.  Given this fact, I recommend this drive over the Hitachi Deskstar.

Model Numbers:
The drive I tested is the Model HD103SJ.  It is a 7200 rpm drive, and is the same linked via this review to epinions stores (most of them anyway...)

Samsung also makes a Model# HD103SI, which is almost the same except @ 5400 rpm.  It will use a bit less electricity, but will also be slower than the 7200 rpm model.  I recieved a mix of both models listed as the same drive on epinions in the comparisons.  They are not the same drive, so pay attention to the rpm & model number to make sure you know what you're getting.