Very similar to their 5400s, JoJo. Cheap, boring, fast enough to put them in the ballpark (perhaps a fraction less fast compared to the other 7200s than the Spinpoint 5400s are compared to other 5400s), reliable as sunrise.
We have sold over 1000 Samsung drives now, and in all those drives we have had one in-service failure (a V1020 which I suspect had been abused by its dickhead owner though I don't know for sure, and which, two years on, had developed a single bad sector) and one DOA (a V30 which detected as the wrong size).
(I'm ignoring a batch of 20GB VB30s that I foolishly ordered from a low rent supplier because of an urgent stock shortage, and which arrived with shipping damage - which, given that there was no packaging at all, just the three drives in their clamshells rattling around in a box big enough to fit ten motherboards, I fully intend not to count in my figures. Astonishingly enough, only one of the three had bad sectors, the other two survived and seem to work just fine. To my shame, I sold them (it really was an urgent shortage) and they are both still in service. But if either one comes back faulty, I won't count it.)
At a guess, there would be about 100 of those drives that were 7200 RPM models, maybe a little more. We only sold ~40 of the P20 (we were mostly doing WD 7200s at the time) but the 40GB P40 is our best-selling drive right now and we will see quite a lot more of these over the next little while, I imagine.
Of the 7200s, not one has given the slightest trouble.
They are pretty quiet on the whole, but not as noticably so as the 5400s or the Seagate Cuda ATA IV. I think they vary a bit more than most models, some seem to be louder than others - a sort of whine, though still not by any means loud. I'm not sure of this last. I am a poor judge of drive noise because the workshop is full of other computers, A/C unit, exhaust fan, radio sometimes, music quite often , Kristi much of the time, and the bloody telephone almost all the bloody time.
And at home, where I have a P40 data drive, it is drowned out by the PSU, the CPU fan and the X15 anyway.
The performance is good enough - hell, as the owner of two X15s no IDE drive can get me too excited about its performance - and I have come to trust them utterly.
Recommended.
