Reading and Writing Performance

The Samsung HD103UJ is capable of Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) meaning that you can choose between a silent mode with a slightly reduced speed and a fast mode that will cause the drive to make more noise. In this review we will run all tests twice, once using silent and another time using the fast mode. The drive was connected to the mainboard’s ICH9R with the controller configured to AHCI mode.

For this test we will use HD Tune Pro 3 and conduct reading and writing benchmarks. We would like to point out that HD Tune Pro results may differ from one system to another and results could also be operating system dependent.

Samsung HD103UJ Read Benchmark

Samsung HD103UJ reading in silent mode

Samsung HD103UJ reading in fast mode

The drive can keep a transfer rate of more than 100 MB/sec within about the first 50% of its capacity. While the differences in transfer rate between fast and silent mode are only marginal the access times in silent mode are about 13% higher than in fast mode.

Samsung HD103UJ Write Benchmark

Samsung HD103UJ writing in silent mode

Samsung HD103UJ writing in fast mode

The drive’s writing speed is a little lower than the reading speed. But even here we can achieve a transfer rate of more than 100 MB/sec within the first 40% of the drive’s capacity. However the average transfer rate throughout the disc achieves an excellent 90 MB/sec which is a very good value for a harddisc spinning at 7,200 rpm.

HD Tach Full Bench

To round off the reading/writing benchmarks, we also include a test from HD Tach.

HD Tach results in silent mode

HD Tach results in fast mode

The values provided by HD Tach are similar to those of HD Tune Pro. The burst speed shows that the drive is able to exceed the SATA-1 limit of 150 MB/sec when transferring cached data.

Advanced benchmarks

For these tests we used H2benchw. H2benchw communicates with the Samsung HD103UJ at low level and should therefore, at least in theory be, operating system independent. This test suite is capable of testing many aspects of a drives performance, including simulated real world tests.

We used the –a option (all tests) which depending on the drive’s capacity and speed will take a few hours to complete.

We will present performance graphs where available. Other test results will be presented in the form of text and tables.

Zone reading test

Zone reading in silent mode

Zone reading in fast mode

In our graphs above, we can see that there is almost no difference between silent and fast mode. This is exactly what we expect for a sequential reading test. At the beginning of the disc the HD103UJ is able to achieve a reading speed of almost 120 MB/s which is going down to about 60 MB/s at the end of the disc.

Zone writing test

Zone writing in silent mode

Zone writing in fast mode

Again you can hardly see a difference between fast and silent mode and just like in our reading test, the drive is able to transfer almost 120 MB/sec at the beginning of the disc, slowing down to about 60 MB/s at the end.

H2benchw reading and writing test results and comparison tables

Below we can see the full reading and writing test results from H2benchw in the form of tables, which display the results of our review drive.

Repetitive and sequential read/write tests

The drive achieves excellent transfer rates in both AAM modes.

Sustained transfer rate (block size: 128 sectors)

Again the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ shows that it can achieve very high transfer rates when reading and writing data.

Random read/write access times

The seek times throughout the disc are quite good for a 3.5” drive

Simulated application read/write tests

H2benchw application profile (silent)

H2benchw application profile (fast)

In our graphs above, we can see that the drive gains an additional 6% performance when switching from silent to fast mode

While we do not have data from other harddiscs for comparison, we assume that these values are not too bad for a 3.5” drive spinning at 7,200 rpm.

Summary:

Read and write speeds seem to be very high on the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ. However we do not have much data from other drives for comparison yet.

Let’s move on to the next page where we test file reading and writing performance...

Introduction & Features

File reading and writing performance