Anyone tried Samsung Spinpoint M6 yet ?

[patsu]

It's the 500Gb 2.5" SATA HDD. Is it reliable ? Is it slow ? Does it heat up more than 320Gb ?

Am considering it for a PS3 upgrade.

 

[Yemeth]

So you already own the 320 GB model?

I am using the 320 GB model... It works as it should, the only annoying thing is the strange clicking noise that occurs sometimes. It is too loud for my taste, supposedly it is made when the HD is "parking". If you already own the 320 GB then you know all of this . But, maybe it will be helpfull for someone else.

Cheers,

Mijo

 

[eastmen]

My friend went through two of these drives (he uses them in a portable enclosure for filimg) They both died within a month.

 

[patsu]

I see. Might be due to power issues:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hdd-galore,1762-3.html

while Samsung's Spinpoint M6 currently is the most expensive (170 Euros). The reason for the confident pricing could be this drive's excellent performance: although the average read access time of 18.3 ms is rather disappointing, this is the first notebook hard drive to deliver more than 70 MB/s on our storage reference platform. Even the average and minimum transfer rates are excellent, and even exceed the performance level shown by the drives running at 7,200 RPM! Application performance underlined what we saw in the low-level benchmark results: this drive is furiously fast for a notebook model.

Unfortunately, it isn't equally efficient: 1.0 W idle power and 3.2 W maximum power are an average result, and only slightly better than what we've seen from modern 7,200 RPM drives. Clearly, the new Samsung drive is a high-flyer, but it's not the right choice for high-efficiency notebooks, where you want to run on battery as long as possible.

 

[patsu]

Anyone tried this instead ? http://www.consolesource.com/ecomm/catalog/Xecuter-HDXT-PS3-Hard-Drive-Xtender-p-2593.html

I am aware of the 500Gb HDD limit: http://www.dtvforum.info/index.php?showtopic=62549&view=findpost&p=1036506

I used to have a 750Gb SATA drive running this way with my PS3. However once the PS3 2.20 firmware game out, it simply refused to boot properly with the drive attached. I tested a brand new 750Gb drive in the same enclosure and the PS3 would format it, but again, it would not boot. I tested a 500Gb drive in the same enclosure and it would format it and boot successfully.

After discussing this on some other forums, the conclusion that I've come to is that PS3 firmware version 2.20 and 2.30 don't support 750Gb and 1Tb drives anymore as a replacement for the internal drive.

The approach is attractive to me because I can get faster and cheaper 3.5" drives. I can also reuse the HDD in my RAID boxes if I upgrade further.

 

[J_Saint]

I'm looking to upgrade my 60GB in November and the 500GB drive from WD caught my eye. It's $150 at Newegg right now like the Samsung. One of the user reviews states after the PS3 format and system reserve you end up with 413GB of free space.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136314

 

[patsu]

Perfect. I will look into this. Thanks J_Saint. Will upgrade as soon as I get hold of one.

The games are coming.

 

[patsu]

I installed the "Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT" HDD tonight.

I heard a lot about stucked screws during HDD upgrade. So I was pretty careful. Was able to remove all the screws with a #1 philip-head precision screwdriver... except the last one. At that time, I thought it should be a done deal, and started reading a magazine while unscrewing the HDD. I ended up stripping the screw >_<

The first 4 were not that difficult to remove. Only needed to pick the right-sized screwdriver and hold tight. The last one should be easy too if I weren't careless.

Anyway, I was able to remove the stripped screw using a long-nose plier.


So far, I have not noticed any slowness, unusual noise or overheat issues. In fact, everything seems snappier than before, but this may be placebo effect.
EDIT: I can hear faint "clicks" when folding, compared to the previous almost silent operation; but it doesn't bother me because I usually have my earphone on.

Restoring about 4Gb of raw system + application data took about 12 minutes. The only problem is copying the game saves. There is no way to copy multiple game saves at once. I had to enumerate and copy them one by one. I chose not to backup everything because my backup drive is small.

Redownloading games is surprisingly fast.

I bought a video from the PS Video Store accidentally. Will call Sony to transfer the license to my new HDD tomorrow.

That's all for now !