SAMSUNG Spinpoint M7E HM641JI 640GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5″ Internal Notebook Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: I’ve had this drive for just over a year now. I’ve had it in 3 laptops and filled it and re-filled it with very large files. It’s taken everything I’ve thrown at it.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: To those who have troubles with drives in external enclosures, I find those problems often come from two preventable causes:
1. Not using a Y-cable on a drive which needs more then 500 mA of power under load, or
2. Using a Y-cable, but plugging it into the drive before plugging both ends into the computer.
Either one of these will destroy a drive — maybe not the first time you do it, but soon.
Or you could have just a bad drive. Every manufacturer has marginal drives which slip through QA.

Pros: As fast (or faster) than a lot of 7200rpm drives due to the two large platters, gobs of storage.

Cons: A bit noisier than the 250GB drive that came in my MBP…

Overall Review: While somewhat pricier than a 500GB, this 640GB drive is still a good deal. I got mine when it was $10 off, so that made it even better. I have a Samsung drive in each of my Macs (a white Macbook for my wife and my 13″ MBP) and have been very happy with both of them.

Pros: Very quiet, faster than the WD640 by about 10MB/s. Lots of storage, use mine for esata external and it performs flawlessly.

Cons: None!

Overall Review: These are the ultimate in affordable storage and mobility when powered through USB on a esata. I wouldn’t use any mechanical drive for OS since going to SSD. I hate to admit I would buy this one again over my two WD640s.

Pros: super quiet. installed on unibody macbook pro. no troubles. seems faster than the previous WD 500 gb blue drive. xbench: esults 55.25
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.6.2 (10C540)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model MacBookPro5,1
Drive Type SAMSUNG HM641JI
Disk Test 55.25
Sequential 99.72
Uncached Write 69.55 42.70 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 117.18 66.30 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 104.30 30.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 131.36 66.02 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 38.21
Uncached Write 14.00 1.48 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 99.58 31.88 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 68.63 0.49 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 115.82 21.49 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Cons: None

Overall Review: The best laptop drive I have ever owned. Fast and SUPER SUPER QUIET!!! I have yet to hear a single drive seek/park sound.

Pros: Samsung RMA was a breeze to deal with. Even though the RMA was contracted to a 3rd party company, the whole process was easy and pleasant to deal with. The drive it self is a pretty quiet drive and has decent speeds for what I do. It’s the primary and only HDD in my MSI A6200-038 laptop and I utilize photo editing software, download tons of music, and movies with it. It performed really well until it decided to die on me after a series of BSODs. I ended up losing precious pictures and documents. I’ve since learned my lesson and do regular backups. Overall, this is a great HDD for the price and capacity. With Mechanical hard drives there is an inherent risk of possible corruption of fail simply because it is mechanical, however, I have been pretty happy with this HDD for the time that it was functioning.

Cons: Drive corrupted and died after 6 months.

Overall Review: Samsung’s RMA has a pretty quick turn around time (approximately 1 week, their service center is in New Jersey, I live in California). Wish they would have recovered my data but I guess they figured it’s not worth it.

Pros: Very easy installation to PlayStation 3. Reliable after a month of use, and no sign of any problems so far. Great value for money.

Cons: None to report.

Overall Review: Pretty sure my PS3 also runs a little less hot now, thanks to the new drive. (Also could be due to the fact that I removed a lot of dust from the unit when I changed the drive.)

Pros: Works fine as an upgrade to the newer PS3 model

Cons: None so far.

Pros: Large capacity, cheap

Cons: Feels a little slower then my mbp’s stock hitachi drive. It vibrates enough when spinning up that i can feel it under my palms while typing. Its definitely louder then the stock drive too.

Overall Review: I got the drive for real cheap with free shipping. Definitely was a steal for the size. Only time will tell if the vibrations are gonna cause it to fail.