I decided, based on anecdotal testimony, that I will buy Samsung for my new internal HD. My current system has problems and I want to rebuild my ArchLinux box with 64 bit and see if I can get better performance.

I only need 500G, but beyond that I'm not sure what to look for. I'm in Israel, so I will buy online here, but there are lots of Samsung brands here I see, such as "Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB HD502HJ" or "Samsung Spinpoint M7 500GB HM500JI" or "640G/7200/SATA/16‏ Samsung 640G 16Mb"

They mostly appear to be SATA, or "SATA 2 - 3Gb/s" and 7200 RPM. Different amounts of RAM like 64 MB etc.

I use this machine for web development, but no gaming nor videos nor graphics. I often do run large operations in MySQL like importing large-ish SQL dumps or running large complicated queries. Beyond that, I tend to run a lot of apps at the same time and a lot of tabs in Firefox.

I have an "Intel(R) Core(TM) i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz" on an Intel DH55PJ board (I think) a and Hitachi 1 TB sata 7200 RPM and 4 G RAM.

Thank you.

I've never been a huge fan of Samsung drives except for some of their single platter Spinpoints for near silent HTPC's. That said, the Spinpoint F3's have a decent reputation for consumer level drives.

If you weren't aware, Samsung's HDD operations are now part of Seagate (a drive brade I can recommend from long experience)

Yes, that is true, I found article about it while searching for HDDs.

I agree that the Spinpoint F3 would be a good option. Good cache size is important, as well as transfer speed, if listed.

Great. Attached are the specs. I think 3G is the transfer speed and that's good. 16MB is less than 32 I suppose, but does that matter much? I see on newegg that the 1TB version has 32 MB, but the other specs (aside from the size) are about the same. Funny ,newegg has another one here for $10 more but the only difference is 0.3ms latency. I don't think that's worth $10.

Anyhow, the one I found online locally is attached. It's $131 USD . I see the 1 TB version with 32 MB RAM is also here in Israel (in English) for $182 USD. I don't need the extra 500 GB but if the extra 16 MB was worth it (i.e. I will see a difference in performance), I would consider that, although it seems not worth it to me.

Thanks.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Oh, actually now I see Data Transfer Rate on both the image I uploaded and the Israeli URL. Seems it's better for the 500 GB drive...

If the transfer rate is the same then just get the 500 GB one. A larger cache is needed for larger HDDs to keep their speed up. It's rare but some HDDs of a certain size have a small cache that might cause slowdowns. From what I see, nearly all 500 GB drivers have 16 MB cache.

Excellent. I ordered it. Thank you so much H_TeXMeX_H again for your help!

Theres more differences than you've guessed.

F3 is a normal drive, 3 year warranty. F3R is a 'enterprise/raid edition' drive with a 5 year warranty. Generally, the 'enterprise' level drives have higher end components, and/or they are cherry picked. They also tend to have different firmware.

Factory figures can be misleading. I dont know where you are seeing the data transfer rate for the 500GB drive (the page is in english, but navigation isnt). But it looks like there are SATAIII 500GB samsung HDDs in there, if you are comparing a SATAII to SATAIII HDD purely 'on the numbers' the SATAIII HDD will look better (due to SATAII being 3Gbit/sec and SATAIII being 6Gbit/sec).

However, there will be little difference between a SATAII HDD and SATAIII HDD now. The (sequential) transfer speeds from traditional platter HDDs havent got to the speed limit of SATAII (they are only just breaking SATAI speeds). It will only make a difference to burst speeds, which dont matter that much for most users.

A larger cache isnt a bad thing at all, but it doesnt make that much difference. It makes the most difference if you are reading, and writing at the same time, AND the file/files you are trying to write is smaller than the cache.

For reading only, or writing only, or reading/writing where you are trying to write a file bigger than the cache, cache makes less difference than you might guess.

Looking in the wrong place? A lot of 500GB drives are 16MB, but older 8MB drives are still around. Newer/'better' drives have been moving to larger cache sizes for a while, with 500GB 32MB cache is farily common now (eg all 500GB WD GP drives), and 64MB cache drives are around (eg WD RE4 WD5003ABYX.

Checking the WD site, it doesn't look like the bigger cache speeds them up, so 16 MB should be enough. I have seen ones with 8MB and that may be too low.

You're just loooking at interface speeds there, not real speeds.

Cache doesnt make that much difference. If you took a current WD 'caviar black' (32/64M cache, depending on model) and reduced the cache to 8MB, it would still be faster than a WD 'Green power' drive with 32/64MB of cache.