Now, let’s watch the Samsung team getting through this test:

The two drives of the new SpinPoint P80 series are practically identical, although connect across different interfaces. The SV1203N is a bit slower than them, because it has a lower spindle rotation speed, 5400rpm. At the same time, you see that drives from Samsung with different rotational speeds similarly react to the increase of the writes share. It’s clear we have no artificial “slowing-down” of the junior product here.

The situation remains the same under a higher load. The drive with the lower rotational speed quite predictably loses in performance to the pair of 7200rpm drives. In the leading duo, the SP1213C is a little faster than the SP1203N in modes with a high percentage of writes. This is no wonder as the SP1213C has an 8MB buffer, while the SP1203N has four times less of cache memory.

It’s again the same under the maximum workload. The SP1203N is a little faster in modes with a small percentage of writes, while the SATA drives speed ups when there are more writes in the queue.