Whilst 500GB may seem small these days, what with 2TB drives becoming part and parcel of modern day life, there are times when a smaller drive can become handy! More so if you need to save every ounce of money or are simply upgrading from a smaller capacity drive with an older OS.
Box Contents
For £32+vat you can’t go to wrong with the Samsung drive that we got from Quiet PC to review. Whilst it's not a full retail version (in that you don’t get SATA cables or software), you still get the instructions and a set of mounting screws.
Fitting the drive was also a synch as it conforms to 3.5” SATA compliance standards.
In Use
In use the drive was not the quietest drive we have ever heard but then again it's not the noisiest either (certainly when compared to our existing Samsung Drive, which makes a right racket!)
With the drive idle or transfering smaller amounts of data you can hardly hear it. To be honest the noise levels are even lower when the case is closed (more noise came from the case fans).
We have tried to capture the audible levels with our iPhone to give you a basic idea (see the video below).
As for the heat, well we found the drive gets a little warm to the touch, but its nothing more than most drives of this type, let's put it this way we did not notice any major heat coming from the drive after several hours of use (note this was with office use only).
Features
1. Environment friendly product with RoHS compliance
2. Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps Interface Support
3. Improved performance with dual-ARM based firmware
4. Improved recording stability over temperature with PMR
5. ATA S.M.A.R.T. Compliant
6. Advanced dynamic FOD control for best data integrity
7. ATA Automatic Acoustic Management Feature
8. Intelligent compensation of external disturbance
9. ATA 48-bit Address Feature
10. SATA Native Command Queuing Feature
11. ATA Device Configuration Overlay Feature
12. Device Initiated SATA Power Management
13. NoiseGuard
14. Rotational vibration sensor
15. SilentSeek
As you can see from the above table the drive has a decent set of features (the full spec can be found by following this link http://www.quietpc.com/gb-en-gbp/products/components/t-series-hdd).
To test the drive we used a piece of software called PC Wizard to give you a better idea of the drives transfer rate, but we must add this was with Avast (virus checker) active and we were only using a motherboard with a SATA controller - not the faster SATA II standard - so you should get better performance with one of these (though the drive still only runs at 5400rpm).
However compared to our test computers hard drive, this updated drive certainly does a better job and we would whole heartedly recommend it for those looking for a cheaper drive with decent performance (opening apps such as Adobe CS was repectable and as for games you should have no probs).
| Performance | Samsung HD501LJ - 500GB Hard Drive | Samsung HD503HI SATA - 500GB Reviewed |
| Sequential Writing MB/s | 46 | 81 |
| Sequential Read MB/s | 68 | 97 |
| Buffered Writing MB/s | 160 | 180 |
| Buffered Reading MB/s | 182 | 192 |
| Random Reading MB/s | 31 | 87 |
