One can do no more than one can (although we remember IBM/Hitachi drives do it). The Samsung drive lost to the one from Maxtor that has higher “raw” speed. Seagate solution had a good turn, too. Its results are close to those of Samsung PL40. The IBM/Hitachi follows close behind, while Samsung P40 is a quarter behind, as it should be.

Now, let’s go to copying …

I say it’s a shock! The new Samsung is faster by a half than the copy ex-champion, Maxtor! As for the remaining drives, the IBM/Hitachi did quite well, outperforming Maxtor on small and middle-sized files.

The Samsung is leading at copying both small and large files between two partitions. The previous model from Samsung was quick at copying, too, but the new one is better than everything I have ever seen.

Yeah, this part of the competition was the most spectacular. I guess there is no need to comment: a glance at the diagram is enough to tell the winner.

Conclusion

Thanks to its liquid bearings and house technologies of noise reduction, SpinPoint PL40 was the most noiseless, much better than an analogous drive from Maxtor. The spindle squeaked no louder than in Barracuda 7200.7, while positioning sound of the Samsung drive was much less perceptible. You can only hear it when the case is open. The buzz of the Seagate drive has more high-frequency components and is more irritating. As for shock-tolerance, SpinPoint PL40 can match the higher-priced Barracuda 7200.7, but beats it in performance!

The ATA/133 interface doesn’t bring any advantages to Samsung SpinPoint PL40, although it does load the CPU less than ATA/100. On both interfaces, the drive shows good results, and has no performance slumps we saw in the first ATA/133 drives from Maxtor. Another nice fact is that Samsung has grown past infantile sicknesses like fear of NTFS file system we saw in SpinPoint V60 and made a very fast hard disk drive. The new model is much faster than Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 8 and is on equal terms with the IBM/Hitachi. Although Samsung didn’t win all the nominations, it always stepped on the podium, and often outran its more renowned competitors.

Our today’s review produced a rather surprising outcome: the budget model from Samsung is an absolute champion among all (once again – ALL) hard disk drives we have ever tested in file-copy speed test. Even Western Digital drives of the JB series with a larger cache-buffer (which positively tells on copying speed) are left behind. And we have not yet tested the full-size SpinPoint P80, which should be even faster…