Samsung SP2504C 250 GB SATA-300 Hard Disk Drive Review

Introduction

Samsung SP2504C is a 250 GB hard disk drive using the new SATA-300 interface, which allows a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 300 MB/s. Its main specs also include an 8 MB buffer, 7,200 rpm rotation speed and support to NCQ (Native Command Queuing). In this review we checked the performance of Samsung SP2504C installed on a motherboard using a regular SATA-150 port and also on a motherboard using the new SATA-300 port.

This very same hard disk drive is also available with a 200 GB capacity, being called SP2004C. Both belong to SpinPoint P120 series from Samsung.

Figure 1: Samsung SP2504C, 250 GB, SATA-300, 7,200 rpm and 8 MB buffer.

Figure 2: The other side of Samsung SP2504C.

As you can see in Figure 2, it requires a SATA power connector.

Samsung SP2504C is based on the Marvell 88i6525 controller (also called SOC, System On a Chip). This chip is not only one of the smallest Serial ATA HDD controllers available on the market, but also is natively SATA-300, supporting NCQ.

Its 8 MB buffer is made by Samsung K4S641632H-UC60 SDRAM memory chip (it holds 64 Mbits, which equals to 8 MB).

As motor driver Samsung SP2504C uses HA13645 chip from Hitachi.

Figure 3: Controller chip (Marvell 88i6525) and buffer chip (Samsung K4S641632H-UC60).

The real capacity of this hard disk drive is of 232.88 GB, since all manufacturers assume that 1 GB is 1 billion bytes, while 1 GB is in fact 1,073,741,824 bytes (2^30).

This hard disk drive also has a SATA-150/SATA-300 jumper, which should be installed in case you find some incompatibility between your SATA-150 motherboard and your hard disk drive. We installed this hard disk drive on a SATA-150 motherboard and we found no compatibility problems at all and we hadn’t to install this jumper.