SAMSUNG Spinpoint MP4 HM500JJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5″ Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: Super quiet, cheap, huge storage!

Cons: Breather hole in the wrong place for Macs!!!

Overall Review: I just installed this in my Macbook Pro (1,1) Core Duo. This is the model before the unibody. It’s even more quiet than the factory installed Seagate it replaced. I didn’t know Samsung made notebook drives but I guess so. They make everything else. DO YOUR HOMEWORK before buying this or any notebook drive. (I made the mistake of buying and IDE enclosure to my existing drive!) If you have the older (non-unibody) macbook pro then you’re probably better off with the Seagates or WDs. I steered away from them because I read reviews indicating the WD drives are loud while the Seagate’s are unreliable. I was going to buy the 500 GB 72000 RPM Hitachi but was afraid because many people complained about the breather hole issue. (The drive ribbon supposedly covers the breather hole which supposedly will cause the drive to fail fast.) Well this drive has the EXACT same issue. I got clever and used electric tape to hold the ribbon out of the way of the hole. It’s not too difficult but be careful!!

Pros: Installed this in an external enclosure for use as a Windows 7 backup. Everything went well, format and error-checking with surface analysis was clean and fast. The initial windows 7 backup and system image went smooth and quick.

Samsung has become my “go-to” HDD brand.

This drive is rated at 1 Amp max, so a single USB 2.0 port provides all the power it needs. That’s important for this job.

For this shipment, NewEgg packed this OEM drive, along with other items, very well. Nice job, NewEgg.

Cons: There really are no cons. It’s barely audible in the enclosure, and certainly quiet enough.

Overall Review: The enclosure used is a KINGWIN ATK-25U-BK, NewEgg #N82E16817121052. I’ve used four of these now for the same purpose on other Win 7 machines.

This combination is ideal. It’s all standard, with interchangeable or easily re-purposed parts, and no proprietary or “value added” junk software, at a good price.

All from the ‘Egg.

Pros: Functions as advertised, still works perfectly.

Cons: It was not lowered from the sky by angels.

Overall Review: Bought this when it was $70 a year ago to replace the 120gb 5400rpm HD in a dead gateway, has been working perfectly so far!

Pros: Price.

Cons: Rumble factor in my thinkpad was medium for a 7200 rpm drive. It definitely runs on the warm side. Unfortunately, I started getting drive errors in syslog and eventually after about 3 more days I lost everything. All of my partitions (ext4, ntfs, fat32) were inaccessible.

Overall Review: Ended up going back to a 5400 rpm drive after two bad experiences with 7200 drives. Its possible these drives just cooked in my thinkpad with a docking station.
Luckily newegg refunded my money and didn’t charge any fees. thanks guys.

Pros: It worked in an old 17″ HP that my friend picked up from the trash.

Cons: nothing

Overall Review: My friend saw an old discarded 17″ HP DV8000 laptop besides the dump. He pick it up and showed it to me to check it out. I checked and found out memory was not working. I replaced the memory and viola it was fixed. I told him to buy a hard drive because of the age of the laptop it’s better to replace it. Used this samsung and it speed up the whole thing. I installed Windows 7 and he got a working laptop. He is now a very happy person.

Pros: Used in an HP Pavilion dv7 laptop as a second drive. Very fast and quiet.

Cons: None.

Pros: works

Cons: not appreciably better than 5400RPM WD Blue

Overall Review: Windows Experience Index my Laptop Hard drive went from 5.7 to 5.9 when I replaced my WD Blue 5400 RPM drive with this Samsung 7200RBM drive. Meh.

Pros: Great looking drive, fit system perfectly, installed easily, and system located it right away. Works great as the secondary drive in the system I built.

Cons: N/A

Overall Review: Windows 7 was a pain, had to initialize and format drive before system would give it a drive letter and Microsoft buried the way to do it, got it done but what a hassle.