Photo: Red Hill.
Samsung SpinPoint V30
Sometimes boring is good. These looked the same as the V2040, performed more-or-less the same, were just as quiet, and just as reliable. The size went up and the price went down, nothing else changed. This is the sort of boredom we love!
Notice the odd-ball sizing: with 30GB/platter you have a maximum of 15GB available per head. The cost to manufacture the 20GB version, in other words, was exactly the same as that of the 30GB unit! This artificial reduction of the capacity of the drive would have been unthinkable a few years previously. Now, with huge capacity attained so routinely, drive manufacturers could afford to waste some of it just to fit into a market niche.
| Performance | 1.37 | Reliability | AAA |
| Data rate | 402 Mbit/sec | Spin rate | 5400 RPM |
| Seek time | 8.8ms | Buffer | 512k |
| Platter capacity | 30GB | Interface | ATA-100 |
| SV2002H | 20GB | 2 GMR head | **** |
| SV3002H | 30GB | 2 GMR heads | ***** |
| SV4003H | 40GB | 3 GMR heads | *** |
| SV6004H | 60GB | 4 GMR heads |