Path: news.uh.edu!barrett From: c.j.coulson@newcastle.ac.uk (C. J. Coulson) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Samsung SHD-3212A hard drive Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.hardware Date: 8 Nov 1994 20:17:45 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 346 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <39omd9$7ji@masala.cc.uh.edu> Reply-To: c.j.coulson@newcastle.ac.uk (C. J. Coulson) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: hardware, IDE, hard drive, commercial Originator: barrett@karazm.math.uh.edu PRODUCT NAME Samsung SHD-3212A hard drive BRIEF DESCRIPTION This is a 420 MB 3.5" IDE hard drive for the A4000 and other Amigas with the capacity for a 3.5" IDE drive. For best results, this review should be read alongside the review written by Jorgen Grahn of the same hard drive. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: this review can be found in the file hardware/storage/SamsungSHD-3212A in the c.s.a.reviews archives. See the signature, below, for the archive location. - Dan] AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Contact Information for Samsung Head Office (Korea) Name: Samsung Electronics Storage Device Subdivision Computer Systems Business Division Address: 416 Maetan -3Dong Paldal-Gu Suwon Kyung Ki-Do Korea 441-742 Telephone: (0331) 200-7635 FAX: (0331) 200-7665 Note: I do not have any other address/phone number for Samsung. Also note that the phone/fax numbers will require the South Korean international access code added (unless you are located in South Korea :)). [MODERATOR'S NOTE: I am sure that Samsung has a local address in most countries. - Dan] LIST PRICE I have never seen the official price for this drive listed anywhere in the UK, and since it seems to be a new drive, few suppliers actually stock it (at the time of writing this review). I paid 179.99 UK Pounds for mine. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga with space for a 3.5", 1" high hard drive, and an IDE interface; e.g., the A4000. SOFTWARE Some form of hard drive preparation utility, like HDToolBox supplied with some Workbench 3 machines. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga A4000/030, 2MB Chip RAM and 4MB Fast RAM. Seagate 124MB IDE Hard Drive (ST3144AT). Kickstart 3.0, Workbench 3.0. INSTALLATION Do NOT install anything inside your Amiga unless you know exactly what you are doing. Be especially careful with anti-static precautions, since the internals of both the Amiga and the hard drive are sensitive to static discharges. If you are in any doubt whatsoever, leave the installation to a professional. It may cost you some money, but you'll be buying peace of mind. If you are capable of installing hardware yourself, then read on; if not, then skip immediately to the next section. Thank you. The A4000 was designed to be accessible. Removing the casing is a simple matter of removing two screws and pulling the cover off, remembering to pull up then back in order to disengage the locking tabs at the front of the case. (You can't see them until you get the cover off, but you'll know about them soon enough if you try sliding the cover off without lifting up first. :-)) Once inside, and working with the front of the A4000 facing me (I prefer it that way, though you may prefer a different orientation), the data and power cables attached to the existing hard drive were removed. My Seagate drive grips its power connector very tightly, so I find it easier if I remove the data connector first, giving me more finger room to grip the power connector. You may also like to remove the data connector from any drives installed in the front drive bays, as you could then hang that ribbon cable out the back of the A4000. It's not necessary though. After detaching the existing drive from its cables, the four FLATHEAD screws securing the drive cradle to the A4000 are removed, and the cradle lifted out of the casing. Note that there is a clear plastic sheet between the cradle and the Zorro backplane. You will most likely need to reposition this later on... Depending on whether you are mounting the Samsung drive as a slave or a master drive will determine what to do next. Since the only jumper settings I had for the Seagate drive were to set it up as a master drive, that is what I did. Note, I obtained the settings from Amiga Format issue 55, as I didn't get any jumper settings with the A4000. For those of you with a Seagate 124MB drive, to set it up as a master drive you must put a jumper across the middle set of pins on the jumper block, which is located on the PCB side of the drive next to the data interface. A problem here is that my Seagate did not come with spare jumpers. However, since the Samsung drive comes with more jumpers than necessary to set it up as a slave drive, I took one of the redundant jumpers from that drive and used it on the Seagate. Unusually the Samsung jumpers are slightly smaller than the norm, but they can be persuaded to fit the jumper pins on the Seagate drive. If you're not happy about this kind of thing, correct sized jumpers can be bought from most electronic component suppliers for next to nothing. Once the jumpers on both drives had been set, the Samsung drive was located in the drive cradle and the supplied ROUNDHEAD screws used to secure it in place, noting that the drive should be oriented the right way around, with the PCB facing down when the cradle is held the right way up. The full cradle is then replaced in the A4000, remembering to reposition the plastic sheet, and the whole mass is secured with the FLATHEAD screws you remembered to keep safely to one side (what's that, you lost one? Bummer...). Now the data and power cables are connected. It doesn't matter which power cable goes to which drive, but you must use the correct data connector. However, due to the preforming of the ribbon cable used, the correct connector should line up with the correct drive pretty much automatically as soon as you put the cable back in place, FLAT across the top of the drive cradle. If you disconnected any other cables, you'd better replace them now, because in a moment the casing is going back on. OK, put the case back on, remembering those tags at the front that cause problems on the left side of the A4000 case, since the controller ports stick out just a bit too far and cause the bottom lip of the case to snag when dropping it down into place. You therefore have to remember not only to pull the case out a bit to clear the ports, but also to get the locking tag lined up. Assuming you get the case back together neatly, you can connect up the power, monitor, keyboard and mouse. If you feel confident you could connect up any other peripherals you have, but if you messed up on the installation, you'll just have to disconnect them all again in order to open the case back up. Let's assume the hardware side of things went fine, and you are now looking at your Workbench screen. You need to use whatever installation software you have in order to let the system know about the new drive. For A4000 owners, just follow the HDToolbox instructions in the manual and create whatever sized partitions you like. Note that the drive, although marked as a 420MB drive, will only format to 405MB. Now this is normal for a hard drive, since my 124MB Seagate is marked as a 144MB drive. Usually Amiga dealers will advertise drives with the installed sizes, whereas PC dealers use the manufacturers sizes, but this is by no means a hard and fast rule. After setting your partitions, next comes the joy of formatting them. Beware, formatting 400MB of drive space takes about ten minutes, so you may like to go off and have a coffee break now while your Amiga does some of the hard work for a change. That should be it. You now have 400+MB of free hard drive space, just ready for all those GIFs and JPEGs from certain Usenet groups............ ahem, or if you prefer, a barrow load of clip art and fonts, Imagine objects, SoundTracker modules etc. REVIEW Well, it's a hard drive, a big cheap hard drive. It shows no signs of dislike to either my A4000 or the Seagate drive forced to share a mounting cradle with it. Sysinfo reports a speed of 1MB/second for the Seagate drive and 1.4MB/second for the Samsung. Since some people like to ignore Sysinfo results, claiming inaccuracies, I conducted some simple real world tests. Using a 1.2MB LhA archive held in RAM:, the following scripts, also in RAM:, were executed five times each, and the resultant timings averaged. date copy test.lha Seagate:test/ date date copy test.lha Samsung:test/ date date copy Seagate:test/test.lha ram: date date copy Samsung:test/test.lha ram: date Results: Drive: RAM: to Drive: Drive: to RAM: Seagate 4 seconds 3 seconds Samsung 2 seconds 2.5 seconds So it would appear that the Samsung is about twice as fast as the Seagate when writing to the drive, but only about 1.2 times faster at reading. It also suggests that the Sysinfo drive transfer rates are indeed suspect, at least when dealing with transfers of around 1MB. Just as an aside, the documentation that came with the drive suggested a transfer rate of 8 (EIGHT!!) MB/second. Where do they get these figures from? (Although bear in mind the IDE interface is controlled by the host CPU, so I guess if the drive was fitted to a Warp Engine equipped A4000 you could increase the real world transfer rate somewhat :)). Another useful fact from these tests was that the LhA archive remained uncorrupted after being passed to and from the Samsung drive, which means that since I had left the MaxTransfer rate at the default setting, the Samsung drive will work with that setting, unlike some other IDE drives. Unlike Jorgen, I find the noise the drive makes to be fairly normal. It is louder than the Seagate drive, and to me it sounds like someone tapping their fingernails on a hard table top. It occurs only when the drive is stepping its heads in and out, in the same way that Amiga floppy drives make a loud noise only when stepping from track to track. If your Amiga has a cooling fan, or if you listen to music whilst computing, you'll probably not notice the sound after a short while. I've heard much worse noises coming from other types of IDE drive. DOCUMENTATION Here I begin to differ substantially from Jorgens' review. My drive, purchased in the UK, came with a small six page booklet, detailing the specifications of the drive, the jumper settings to use, notes on installation and formatting. However, the formatting notes assume you have fitted the drive to a PC and are of little or no use to the average Amiga user. On the other hand, the notes about jumper settings are good, with a very clear diagram showing just where the jumpers are located. LIKES The price is low, certainly lower than that of any other 420MB IDE drive in the UK. The build quality appears excellent, with no last minute changes to the PCB apparent. The installation instructions are clear and tell you what you need to know, apart from Amiga specific things which you couldn't really expect the drive documentation to cover, bearing in mind that Samsung no doubt expect most of their drives to be sold to PC owners. Now, unlike Jorgen, I have yet to see the drive fail to spin up from a cold boot. The only two things that differ between my setup and his are that my Seagate drive is a 124MB model rather than an 80MB model, and that (perhaps more significantly) I configured the Samsung as the slave drive, whereas Jorgen made it the master. Since I don't know what the jumper settings are to make the Seagate a slave, I can't test whether swapping the master/slave settings makes a difference; but since I don't think it has anything to do with the difference in our Seagate drives, I can only assume that either I have a later revision Samsung drive which spins up faster, or that setting a slow spin-up drive as a slave somehow makes everything work just fine. Finally, the drive can handle the standard MaxTransfer rate and is 100% compatible with the Seagate drives (copying a 60MB partition from the Seagate to the Samsung caused no data loss or corruption at all, proving that inter-drive transfer works, and general use of the Amiga has shown no problems in accessing data from either drive) DISLIKES Hmmmmm. I suppose it could be even cheaper, but that's really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Honestly, I can't say anything bad about the drive. COMPARISON TO OTHER PRODUCTS See above for speed comparison to the Seagate ST3144 drive. VENDOR SUPPORT I had reason to contact the vendor when the drive was late in arriving (I had ordered the drive as part of a larger order, and two weeks after all the other parts of the order had arrived, the drive had not). A telephone call to the order query line sorted the problem out, a drive was dispatched that day and it arrived three working days later, as the dealer advert said it would. I regard the service I received as good; the phone was answered quickly, the woman at the other end of the line dealt with my query efficiently and in a friendly manner, and she then called back later that day to confirm the dispatch of the drive. WARRANTY No warranty information came with the drive. If any problems arise with the drive I must contact the supplier who will then inform me of what action to take. CONCLUSIONS If you are sick of constantly shuffling files around on your current hard drive and are looking for more drive space, or if you are looking for a first time drive, then this is an excellent purchase. The Cost/Size ratio is very good compared to other sized drives, and it is also (currently) the cheapest 420MB drive. Note that I had read Jorgen's review of the drive before I decided to purchase mine, and until I actually fitted and tested my drive, I was quite prepared to put up with the spin-up problem. The only reason you could be put off buying one of these drives is if you need to be 100% certain that you won't have a spin-up problem. It didn't bother me, and the fact that I don't have the problem is just a nice bonus. COPYRIGHT NOTICE This review can be used in any way, distributed wherever you so desire. Just try and remember the author somehow. :-) Thanks to Jorgen Grahn for the original review, without which this review would probably be about a Western Digital 420MB drive instead. This review was hand crafted by an infinite number of monkeys, aided by Chris Coulson and his A4000. Chris c.j.coulson@ncl.ac.uk --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews