When it comes to hard drives for the desktop, Western Digital, Maxtor and Seagate are the brands that are known to almost everybody. IBM left the arena when it sold its desktop segment to Hitachi, Fujitsu has folded its sails and even Quantum was taken over by Maxtor a while ago. No question about it - the IDE market is a tough one.

However, there are other manufacturers out there. In the case of Samsung, many users don't even know that this Korean company produces desktop hard drives. For many years now, Samsung has been involved in the low-end and mid-range sectors - and has met with success.

The struggle for highest performance and capacity can quickly become a survival issue, as the past has shown. Therefore, Samsung concentrates on the essentials; it builds reliable and technically advanced hard drives, and offers them at reasonable prices.

For this test, we received the latest top-of-the-line model, the SV1204H. With 5400 rpm and a 120 GB capacity divided between only two platters, this hard drive also promises competitive performance at low noise levels.