Test bed:
- Athlon Tbird 1.4 GHz
- IWILL kk266r+ (VIA kt133a chipset)
- 512 megs pc166 cas2 (2* 256)
- Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 2
I will be comparing the Samsung SV1204H (120BG) to the Samsung SP8004H (80GB), the Samsung SP4004H (40GB), and the Maxtor 54098H8 (40 GB).
SiSoft Sandra:

Samsung SV1204H (120GB)

Samsung SP8004H (80GB)

Samsung SP4004H (40GB)

Maxtor 54098H8 (40 GB)
As I suspect the Samsung SP8004H (80GB) won because it is still one of the fastest drives we have tested, but I was rather surprised by the fact that the Samsung SV1204H (120GB) beat out the other hard drives since they are all ata-100 and 7200 RPM, and the SV1204H (120GB) is a 5200 RPM drive.
Winbench 99:
|
Maxtor 54098H8 (40 GB) |
Samsung SP4004H (40GB) |
Samsung SP8004H (80GB) |
Samsung SV1204H (120GB) |
Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
4650 |
5230 |
5750 |
4610 |
HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
13200 |
14400 |
18900 |
16600 |
HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
113000 |
86700 |
139000 |
114000 |
HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
21400 |
25100 |
28300 |
22800 |
HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
16200 |
13800 |
20400 |
16800 |
HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
7950 |
9440 |
10400 |
8160 |
HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
15500 |
9240 |
15000 |
13400 |
HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
19500 |
12500 |
27700 |
21400 |
HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
16700 |
10700 |
20400 |
16500 |
High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
16200 |
13800 |
20400 |
16800 |
Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec) |
4650 |
5230 |
5750 |
4610 |
As I expected, the Samsung SV1204H's slower spindle speed is starting to show its weakness. However it still manages to better some of the other drives, which is impressive.
HDTach 99:

Samsung SV1204H (120GB)
Samsung SP8004H (80GB)
Samsung SP4004H (40GB)
Again, this test shows the weakness of the 5400 RPM spindle speed of Samsungs SV1204H hard drive. This is most apparent with a random seek time of 21.2 ms.