Samsung's silent and speedy SpinPoint S166 series of disks

by Thomas Ricker, posted Apr 4th 2007 at 10:02AM

Samsung is offering-up a heap of marketing spin along side their new 3.5-inch SpinPoint S166 series of hard disk drives. This time however, there's real truth to their ballyhoo. The new series of SATA 3.0Gbps drives feature a 7,200rpm spin, 8MB buffer, and manage to damp the noise level down to a mere 24/27.5 decibels at idle/seek. That's damn quiet for traditional desktop storage spinning at that speed. Watch for the drives to ship worldwide in 80GB and 160GB capacities sometime this month.

Filed under: Desktops, Storage

Tags: 3.5-inch, decibels, disk, hard disk, hard disk drive, HardDisk, HardDiskDrive, hdd, quiet, samsung, silent, spinpoint

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Neutral

MikeN @ Apr 4th 2007 10:16AM

I had no idea there was still a market for an 80G 7200RPM 3.5" drive. Seems kind of ridiculous. Unless they're $20.

Neutral

Dubb @ Apr 4th 2007 10:44AM

Poor man's RAID. Basically you use smaller, 80-160GB, drives for system drives. Where the OS and all applications are stored on this drive. All other data is on large drives. If the OS crashes, breaks, etc. you only need to reformat the small system drive. This doesn't prevent the large drives from failing hardware wise though.

Low Ranked

Schaferhund @ Apr 4th 2007 11:28AM

As opposed to a 28/30 for the comparable STX model. If you can tell the difference between the two I have some loud toddlers to sell you.

STX also has 5-year warranty.

Neutral

Barfito @ Apr 4th 2007 12:55PM

I bought some Samsung drives a couple years ago for a raid 1 setup. They have been flaky at times (I/O errors) and one of them failed. Beware.

Neutral

Jason @ Apr 4th 2007 1:57PM

I bought 3 Samsung 160GB SpinPoint drives about 2.5 years ago. They are fast, and they are very quiet. And every single one of them has failed on me. Their RMA process wasn't very good either. And who cares? Not like I'd put the new drive into anything I cared about. 3 out of 3 failures speaks for itself. Now, I'm all Seagate, all the time. 5 year warranty. No issues yet.

Neutral

Andrew @ Apr 4th 2007 3:34PM

Keep in mind that the difference between 24 and 28 dB is LOGARITHMIC and more than double. decibels DOUBLE every 3. so a 27dB drive is TWICE as loud as a 24dB drive. think before you post.

Neutral

Paris K @ Apr 4th 2007 6:20PM

Seagate and Western Digital are the drives to go for but beware not to get a Maxtor from Seagate. I had a 300GB maxtor drive returned 2 times after failing and it just failed again. That makes a total of 3 drives and the last one I was really careful not to overuse it as I was just using it as an external backup and powered it on 1-2 times a week. I now gave up. There's no point in asking for a new one if its going to fail on me again.

Neutral

Chuckles McGee @ Apr 11th 2007 9:31AM

At first, I thought this said 2.5" drives, which made me giddy at the thought of an ultra-quiet,160gb 7200 rpm notebook drive- then I saw '3.5"'. Boo!

Neutral

closer @ Apr 12th 2007 10:40PM

想必樓上的大哥/大姊沒有努力地追求過低噪音系統。
小弟就曾經組過一套系統，當中最吵的東西，真的，就是硬碟。 -_-|||

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