MaximumPC 2006 10

E

ven though Seagate’s behemoth 750GB Barracuda is getting all the love from

the media these days, most people can’t afford a drive that spacious. The sweet

spot is still at 300-400GB drives, but even those prices fluctuate. Enter the SpinPoint

HD400LJ—a drive that offers both ample room and extreme affordability.

Although it sports a measly (by today’s standards) 8MB buffer, the 400GB

SpinPoint ran amazingly fast in our sequential read speed test, besting nearly

every 7,200rpm drive we’ve ever tested. Its read speed of 61MB/s outpaces

even the mighty WD4000KD,

running neck-and-neck with

that drive’s big brother, the

WD5000KS. The SpinPoint is not

as fast as the 750GB Seagate

Barracuda, but that’s not sur-

prising—nothing is as fast as

the big, bad ‘Cuda.

Aside from its stellar

performance in the sequen-

tial read test, however, the

SpinPoint delivered lackluster

results in the rest of our

benchmark suite. Its seek time

of 15.4ms is surprisingly off-

spec, and this helped it limp

to a substandard score of 26.4

in our application index. The

drive also scored poorly in our IOmeter test, but performed decently in real-

world file-transfer tests.

Yes, the SpinPoint’s performance falls short of first place, but it’s not a

terrible drive—and it has a few noteworthy things going for it. First, look at the

price below (go ahead, we’ll wait). Can you believe it? We searched our favorite

price comparison engines, and couldn’t find a less expensive 7,200rpm 400GB

drive, anywhere. It’s also one of the quietest drives we’ve ever tested. Even dur-

ing seeks it’s barely audible, and it makes no noise at all while idling.

In the final tally, the SpinPoint drive is a compromise. It delivers respect-

able performance and decent capacity, but it’s no match for today’s high-end

7,200rpm drives. While we’d never choose this drive over a faster performer,

it’s great for folks on a budget. We just wonder what Samsung could

do if it paired this drive with a

16MB buffer.

—josh norem

Samsung HD400LJ

Get 400 gigs on the cheap

W

e’ve seen Lilliputian MP3 players before, but Creative has taken the

concept a step further with the Zen V Plus: This change-purse-size

device boasts a vivid 1.5-inch OLED screen for viewing photos and videos.

Besides its dimensions, we think this device’s most interesting feature

is its user interface: Creative has finally come up with something that’s

as simple as the one on Apple’s iPod. The company dumped the twitchy

touchpad used in its larger devices in favor of a tiny joystick. You navigate

the user interface by pushing the joystick up and down to scroll, and left

and right to drill into nested items. Clicking down on the joystick selects the

chosen menu item. To back out of any menu or activity, you simply squeeze

the button with an arrow pointing left. The remaining button on the face

toggles between play and pause.

If we didn’t know better, we’d swear the video screens on the

iPod and on Creative’s Zen Vision: M develop scratches from dust mites

crawling across their surfaces, so we assumed a video device designed

to fit in your pants pocket would have the same lifespan as one of those

microscopic bugs. To our surprise, the Zen V Plus has yet to develop a

single scar, despite being jamming into our jeans alongside car keys and

spare change several times a day for three weeks straight. Creative coats

the entire device with an extremely tough polymer that seems impervious

to scratches.

Photos looks pretty good on the OLED, but video frame rates are slow

and jerky; we definitely

wouldn’t want to watch

a movie on such a tiny

screen. Audio quality was

inferior to that of full-

size players, but not bad.

And Creative’s Zen Media

Explorer software renders

the device quite use-

ful for transporting and

synchronizing media files, documents, and Outlook data (contact database,

calendar, task lists, and so on) between PCs. We’d never rely on this device

as our sole media player, but we’re finding that the more we use

it, the more we like it.

—michael Brown

Creative Zen V Plus 1GB

You want small? We’ll give you small

88 MAXIMUMPC october 2006

reviews Tes Ted. Reviewed. veRdic Tized

we were sur-

prised by

samsung’s

spinPoint. it’s

competitive with

offerings from

wD and seagate,

and insanely

affordable.

creative stuffs this

incredibly small pack-

age with a photo and

video viewer, a Plays

For sure-compatible

mP3 player/recorder,

an Fm radio, an oleD

screen, and 1GB of

flash memory (2- and

4GB models also

available).

8

creative zen v plus

$200, http://www.creative.com

8

samsung spinpoint

$150, http://www.samsung.com

samsunG

Best scores are bolded. *The application index is a real-world script

of six applications. The score is based on the time it takes the drive

to complete the scripts. **Hard drive temperatures measured using

S.M.A.R.T. data, as reported by the Speedfan utility.

benchmarks

HD TacH 3

RanDom access Time (ms) 15.4

BuRsT RaTe (mB/s) 183

avg. sequenTial ReaD (mB/s) 61.3

oTHeR

Doom 3 loaDing (sec) 31

5gB ReaD (sec) 105

iomeTeR 50 peRcenT RanDom) 154  

woRkloaD (io/sec

opeRaTing Temp wiTH no fan** 55 

1. 71 "

2.66

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