The hard drive we are looking at today is the flagship model from Samsung, a name you generally don't associate with hard drives in the first place. Given that we have spent most of our dollars in the office on Maxtor, IBM, and Fujitsu hard drives we weren't quite sure what to expect from Samsung. The best examples of engineering we've seen from Samsung have been in their LCD display market, where we have generally been impressed with their offerings. Conversely, on the MP3 player front we have seen some varied examples of product, some amazing, and some lack luster.

In any case, we started off with an essentially blank slate of what to expect from this 80GB, two platter 5400RPM ATA-100 IDE hard drive. With an average of 8.9ms seek time, and seven way interleave OTF error correction the specs looked good on paper. The low speed of just 5400RPM sounded bad at the beginning, but after realizing there were only two platters, and that the drive was exceptionally quiet we began to rethink some initial assumptions.

On initial inspection, the quality of the aluminum frame seemed to pale when compared head to head with drives from Fujitsu and IBM, showing some extraneous casting marks. Up top, the heavy-weight upper casing looked just fine however. Best of all, the drive proved it self to be very quiet while in operation (max 3.2bels), thanks to something Samsung calls NoiseGuard. At no time did we hear any armature movements during testing.

With the motor wires semi-exposed on the base of the SpinPoint SV8004H it would be worth noting that care should be taken during installation so as not to crush or otherwise damage a wire by carelessness. Other manufacturers have taken to protecting fragile areas like this with small plastic or aluminum shields.