OF ALL THE COMPANIES producing desktop Serial ATA hard drives, Samsung is perhaps the least aggressive. Unlike Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital, which exclusively produce storage products, Samsung has a much more diversified portfolio. LCD monitors, plasma displays, and even semiconductors can have more sex appeal than hard drives, so it's easy to see why Samsung's storage division doesn't get all that much attention. Samsung really has more in common with Hitachi, which among other things, produces hard drives through its Hitachi Global Storage Technology division. Of course, Hitachi has the famous—or more accurately, infamous—Deskstar brand acquired from IBM. Samsung has SpinPoint, a name that even a seasoned PC enthusiast might have a problem placing.

Despite the fact that Samsung's hard drive brand hasn't garnered much attention, the SpinPoint line has developed a small but surprisingly vocal collection of fans in the enthusiast community. Forum threads regularly extol the SpinPoint's affordable price tag, whisper-quiet acoustics, and snappy performance. We even get email asking, practically begging, for us to take Samsung's latest SpinPoints for a, er, spin.

And now we have. The folks at NCIX hooked us up with Samsung's latest desktop Serial ATA offering, the SpinPoint T, and we've run it through our brutal suite of performance, noise, and power consumption tests. Read on to see how the SpinPoint fares against the best Hitachi, Maxtor, Seagate, and Western Digital have to offer.