SAMSUNG Spinpoint M7 HM500JI 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5″ Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: – Quiet
– Low platter count, high areal density
– Good performance
– SMART feature supported

Cons: I bought 4 of these for my QNAP SS-439 Pro NAS.

1 drive had a problem being detected, I had to unplug and then plug it back in for it to be recognized. This caused the RAID5 container to have to be rebuilt every time. Drive 2 started to get bad blocks/sectors after 56 days. I have not replaced it via RMA yet, I just had an extra spare so I am using that for now. We’ll see how the RMA goes with Samsung…

Overall Review: This drive has good specs and it’s quiet, but reliability seems to be much poorer than WD Scorpio line. I can’t imagine using this in a non-RAID setup, you could lose all your data at once without warning.

Pros: fast & quiet (when working)

Cons: 2nd drive attempt after DOA; Second drive stopped working after 2 weeks ownership – lost some data in process.

Overall Review: First drive received in Dec. 09 was DOA; NewEgg replaced and worked great for 2 weeks before giving out. I didn’t want to try replacing again, so NewEgg graciously allowed for refund with paid return shipping and no restocking fee as this was the second defective drive sent. Thanks NewEgg! Going to try Hitachi once refund is complete.

Pros: Huge drive. It’s pretty fast, faster than my previous 160GB drive was. It’s amazing that half a terabyte can fit into a 2.5″ form factor. Worked fine with my external drive that claimed to only support up to 120GB, as well as with my older Intel 945PM chipset in my laptop. It should work in most any recent laptop that has an SATA drive connection.

Cons: My first drive caused a lot of fsck runs on the Linux install, so I ran the Samsung test utility from a FreeDOS bootable USB stick (I recommend keeping one around for BIOS updates and system tools like that) and found a ton of errors on the drive, hence the 4 egg rating. Newegg did a great RMA turnaround for me though, got a new drive within a week or so. It’s annoying that I had to pay $8 or so shipping to finally get a working drive, but it’s still cheaper than buying the drive locally.

Pros: *Massive capacity – 1/2 Terabyte, need I say any more?
*Quiet operation – near silent, I have to look at the drive indicator to see if it is spinning
*Fast – No percivable lag when opening huge drive thrashing applications like Windows Media or games

Cons: None

Overall Review: A very good investment for someone wanting to have a large amont of data at thier disposal.

Pros: Runs very cool, can barely hear the drive even when its running in the open. Can’t hear it at all when it’s in my laptop. Reasonably fast, HD Tune reports an average read of 63.7 and a seek time of 17.8ms. Would likely be perfect for an external enclosure, but is currently running great as my laptop’s second drive.

Cons: May not be fast enough for a gaming laptop, but that’s nitpicking.

Overall Review: I got it on sale for half the current going price of the 7200 rpm 500 gig drive, for that price its definitely worth every dollar.

Pros: Big capacity for a 2.5″, although not the largest. For the price I paid it’s a steal in my opinion.

Cons: none yet (still spinning along)

Overall Review: I write this review about a month and a half after receiving it.

Pros: Good HDD, Great Price

Cons: None

Overall Review: They had a sale on this for 79.99 free shipping, I must say that’s the best deal I’ve seen for a hard drive of this kind. I’m running it in my laptop now and it is amazing, I’d recommend this to anyone.

Pros: Seems to be quiet drive. I have no experience with 7200rpm drives, so I cannot compare it. Excellent price. I upgraded my Macbook pro (early 2006 model-intel core duo 1.83GHz) from 80GB to 500GB. So far so good.

Cons: I will start accumulating junk since I can afford to

Overall Review: Untill this point I was not able to install windows because of space restricitons. Now I plan to install windows XP install VMware fusion and have it going