Photo: Red Hill.
Samsung SpinPoint P80
A typical Samsung drive: quiet, performance near enough to the same as any other 7200 RPM model, as reliable as sunrise.
The P80 arrived mid-way through 2003 with no great fanfare. Rather unusually for a Samsung drive, it was readily available in a range of models: there were 3 basic flavours: 80, 120 and 160GB, all three available with standard ATA interfaces in 2MB and 8MB cache versions, and in SATA with 8MB. Samsung also listed a 60GB unit, but demand for that odd size was never strong and as far as we know it was not imported here. The most popular model by quite a margin was the SP0802N (2MB cache and 80GB).
The P80 has had an extraordinarily long market life: it was still accounting for the majority of Samsung's production as late as July 2005, and remained as popular as ever. It wasn't until April 2005 that a new 200GB model appeared to supplement it.
| Performance | Reliability | AAA | |
| Data rate | 741 Mbit/sec | Spin rate | 7200 RPM |
| Seek time | 8.9 ms | Buffer | 2MB or 8MB |
| Platter capacity | 80GB | Interface | ATA-100 |
| SP0802N & SP0812N | 80GB | 2 GMR heads | ***** |
| SP1203N & SP1213N | 120GB | 3 GMR heads | ***** |
| SP1604N & SP1614N | 160GB | 4 GMR heads | *** |