Samsung 500 GB SATA II Hard Drive HD502HJ

Comment: Read the review on Tom's Hardware. This drive rocks and for the price you just can't beat it. I replaced an 80G 7200rpm WD drive with one of these and the speed increase is obvious. Restoring from a locally stored Ghost image I get 2.7G/min transfer vs. 1.9 for the WD drive.

Comment: I bought this for my parents pc when their hard drive just didn't want to work anymore witch wasn't the first time it happened to this computer. Their pc came with a seagate barracuda 500GB and about 6months later it stopped working so we called the company and after many hours of talking to them we got another seagate barracuda, same one. 5 too 6 months later it stoped working again, witch really sucked because i had a lot of stuff on that computer. so i did some research and found out that the seagate and some sort of problem in the firmware or something like that, and everybody that had that hard drive had the same problem. so i went looking for a different one and finally found this one and so far this one is awesome. works perfectly, and the price is great too. If your looking for a 500GB hard drive look no further because this is the one for you.

Comment: This drive beat my Caviar Black 32mb 640gb drives in every benchmark except random access (samsung 13.3ms vs. WD 12.4ms) Also seems to have a better track record than the WDs as far as failure rate. All around great drive.

Comment: Pros:
One year has passed since the F3 first came out and as far as I can tell it's still the fastest 7200 rpm 500 gig drive on the market, faster than Seagate 7200.12 (clearly) and WD Caviar Black (just barely). Probably the quietest as well. I bought and reviewed this drive almost a year ago--it was my first Samsung--and my experience thus far has been all good. Have bought three more since. No regrets. The F3 has become my drive of choice.

Cons: My older F3s, while performing good as new, are now producing more vibration than my new ones. This concerns me. I will update this review if there is further deterioration.

Other Thoughts:
From my first NewEgg review 8/29/09: "I was looking for the fastest single-platter drive, for the usual technical reasons, having been very pleased with the single-platter low-profile drives in the 7200.10 series. Wasn't sure if the new F3 would live up to the F1's excellent reputation. Found some tests of F3s released a bit earlier in Europe and decided to take a chance. The Polish benchmark turned out to be the closest to what I ended up getting. My newly formatted, otherwise empty disk showed HD Tach readings of 256.2 MB/s burst, 13.5ms random access, 4% CPU utilization, and 121.9 MB/s average read. I tested three times and the numbers were within 1-2%, this being the best. Looks like the F3 is indeed faster than the 7200.12 in synthetic testing. As to real world performance and longevity, we'll see. Will follow up this review if I run into any issues. Based on my first impression, though, I've already ordered a second drive."

Now I have four. Glad I took a chance when these first came out. I have included screen shots of my HD Tach results above.

Comment: This installed with ease and this hard drive doesn't make any noise whatsoever!
forget western digital or others buy this one and you will have no regrets !