Samsung F4 2TB Drive any good ?

hifreak · 18 Sep 2010 at 12:55

R5GTT said:
I can confirm the Samsung F4 works perfectly in my Synology DS209.

Currently copied just over 40GB of data to it and along with it being nice and quiet (can only just hear seek noise very faintly) it has remained at a cool 28 degrees C so the fan in my NAS is barely spinning

It worked straight away with Disk Station Manager 2.3 and I updated to DSM 3.0 Beta and that's working fine as well.

Thats really cool will get 2 on monday, so I am more calm now

Thanks

subbass · 18 Sep 2010 at 13:09

I'm interested in getting this but wondering why is this 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm?

R5GTT · 18 Sep 2010 at 13:22

no problem hifreak

subbass said:
I'm interested in getting this but wondering why is this 5400rpm instead of 7200rpm?

By running at 5400rpm it runs quieter and uses less energy.
Generally speaking a 5400rpm drive will be slightly slower than a 7200rpm drive however if you look at people's benchmarks you will see it is not a lot slower than a spinpoint F3 and is on par with some other manufacturers 7200rpm drives.

subbass · 18 Sep 2010 at 14:01

R5GTT said:
no problem hifreak

By running at 5400rpm it runs quieter and uses less energy.
Generally speaking a 5400rpm drive will be slightly slower than a 7200rpm drive however if you look at people's benchmarks you will see it is not a lot slower than a spinpoint F3 and is on par with some other manufacturers 7200rpm drives.

Brilliant. Shall be ordering one then. Thanks.

psd99 · 20 Sep 2010 at 19:18

anyone else jumped on to this bandwagon yet?

I'm looking very closely at this thread....

terryuk22 · 21 Sep 2010 at 20:51

just swapped boot drives from win 7 to xp now f4 runs like a slug is there a jumper to set to get speed back up

cyber69 · 22 Sep 2010 at 10:56

R5GTT said:
I can confirm the Samsung F4 works perfectly in my Synology DS209.

Currently copied just over 40GB of data to it and along with it being nice and quiet (can only just hear seek noise very faintly) it has remained at a cool 28 degrees C so the fan in my NAS is barely spinning

It worked straight away with Disk Station Manager 2.3 and I updated to DSM 3.0 Beta and that's working fine as well.

Brave decision to go with f4's in your NAS. I just purchased a DS710+ but decided to go with a pair of 2TB f3's instead as they are tested by Synology.

psd99 · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:40

cyber69 said:
Brave decision to go with f4's in your NAS. I just purchased a DS710+ but decided to go with a pair of 2TB f3's instead as they are tested by Synology.

what is the price difference?

they looked the same to me

cyber69 · 22 Sep 2010 at 13:31

psd99 said:
what is the price difference?

they looked the same to me

If you are talking about the hard drive's themselves then there's only a couple of pounds difference (at this moment in time). I suppose sellers will start discounting the f3's once they get more f4's in stock so they can clear old stock out.

psd99 · 22 Sep 2010 at 15:35

cyber69 said:
If you are talking about the hard drive's themselves then there's only a couple of pounds difference (at this moment in time). I suppose sellers will start discounting the f3's once they get more f4's in stock so they can clear old stock out.

damn I don't know how long I can hold on for

I've seen the new F4 for around £75 on some retailers. that's a good price imo
I might wait until the F3 price drops

any ideas how long it will take?

subbass · 3 Oct 2010 at 12:47

I'm confused, can someone explain to me in layman's terms about the sector size and alignment? From what my understanding, it is a 4k but reports to the OS as 512 bytes?

I'm on Windows 7 and the F4 will only be used as a storage drive.

bremen1874 · 3 Oct 2010 at 16:33

Googling '4k sectors' should find plently of articles explaining things.

As you're running Windows 7 you haven't got anything to worry about as the OS will align things correctly.

MikeHunt79 · 3 Oct 2010 at 17:40

bremen1874 said:
Googling '4k sectors' should find plently of articles explaining things.

As you're running Windows 7 you haven't got anything to worry about as the OS will align things correctly.

Google does turn up quite a bit of info on 4k sectors, thanks.

Do you know if OSX and Linux cope with 4k sectors ok also?

I'm planning to split my drive into 4 partitions, split between W7, Linux and OSX, and was wondering if I had to do anything special in order to achieve full performance?

Flanno · 3 Oct 2010 at 17:43

I posted about it here explaining exactly what it is but no one bothered.
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18189193&highlight=Samsung+2TB

bremen1874 · 3 Oct 2010 at 18:04

Do you know if OSX and Linux cope with 4k sectors ok also?

All versions of MacOS should be okay. No idea about Linux.

subbass · 4 Oct 2010 at 20:29

bhavv said:
Somethings wrong with one of my F4s:

Or are they meant to slow down like that with stuff put on them?

I noticed the same on mine as well.

Using CrystaDisklMark, I get:
SEQ: 116.1 106.3
512Kb: 23.13 48.59
4K: 0.447 0.909

When I was copy files over to my fresh F4 getting 106mb per sec, now I'm getting anything from 17mb to 90mb. Is that normal? That is a significant drop.

bremen1874 · 4 Oct 2010 at 21:14

I'd assume that the benchmark needs to use free areas of the drive for its tests (it would overwrite useful data otherwise).

I’d also assume that user data gets written to the fastest areas of the drive first.

If the above it true then you’ll get an apparent reduction in the benchmark speeds because the fastest area of the drive is in use and no longer available for benchmarking.

MTWest · 4 Oct 2010 at 22:16

Anybody bought this drive for backup purposes? I need some more space but they'll sit in the drawer for most of the time with me backing up to a few times a month.

Rhys-M · 10 Oct 2010 at 09:35

These are looking like pretty good drives, will probably look into getting one to replace my 1TB F1

finite · 12 Oct 2010 at 16:57

I've been waiting for a 4K 2TB drive at this sort of price for 6 months or more and now I'm not so sure since it would be the OS drive for Win7 and its handy to be able to boot into XP, run WinDirStat etc and see all the files without any ownership issues.