Samsung Spinpoint F3 slow or normal?

Duderooni

Duderooni

Duderooni

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15 May 2011
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I recently got a new Samsung SP F3 1TB and have to admit, it seems sluggish. My previous drive was hardly bleeding edge but the F3 doesn't seem much different. I wasn't expecting SSD region speeds of course, but I was expecting a bit of a jump up at least.

Unfortunetly, I have upgraded to Windows 7 x64 SP1 at the same time as getting the new drive, so I dont know whether its the OS slowing me down or the HDD. I'll post pictures comparing both of my drives to see if anyone can spot any problems?

This is the Samsung F3 1TB,


Old Seagate 500gb


Now I'm no expert when it comes to HDDs so these graphics don't really tell me much.. What I will say is these drives dont really seem much different when comparing these results?! Also the burst rate is MORE on the Seagate... Could anyone offer me any advice here? :(
 
Your burst rate seems a little low, I am getting 198.3 MB/s, how much of a significance it has on performance I have no idea!

Edit: oh forgot to mention, I have a F3 1TB on a P35 chip set
 
Avathar77 said:
Your burst rate seems a little low, I am getting 198.3 MB/s, how much of a significance it has on performance I have no idea!

Edit: oh forgot to mention, I have a F3 1TB on a P35 chip set
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On your windows experience index, what rating is your drive getting? Mine is getting 5.9 which seems a bit crap to me.. :/

Im a bit concerned with this burst rate, I guessed something was up as soon as I saw that my older drive (which isn't great) had a better burst rate. I seem to be having terrible luck with hardware lately, am I going to have to RMA this? Going to be pretty annoyed having to reformat yet again, Ive only just got this system up and running... :o
 
Check your chipset drivers. A raid card with a read write cache will have a higher 'burst' rate, for example.
 
So I just updated the chipset drivers to the latest version (64bit) from the website, rebooted, tried HD tune again and.... The results are more or less the same as they were.

AbsenceJam said:
That's normal, not sure what you expected, it's still a mechanical disk and the platters are just a bit denser than your previous drive.
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I'm not expecting the F3 to be a miracle drive that's 10 times faster than my previous one, but I was expecting this HDD to beat my previous Seagate dinosaur (2 and a half years at least) to a pulp without so much as breaking a sweat.. The burst rate for my last drive beats my new one (which is 25% slower than the F3 of another member who posted a few hours ago..), I would like to get to the bottom of why my drive seems slow :/ obviously time is against me because if something is wrong I'm going to want to RMA this pretty sharpish.
 
Here's mine for comparison:

a2c88074.png


Your burst rate is slightly lower but it's nothing to worry about.
 
andy_mk3 said:
Here's mine for comparison:

a2c88074.png


Your burst rate is slightly lower but it's nothing to worry about.
Click to expand...

Hmm your the second member here who has the same drive as me and you both have burst rates in the 190s...like 20% more than mine.

I read this apparently taken from the hd tune site describing what the burst rate is: the highest speed (in megabytes per second) at which data can be transferred from the drive interface (IDE or SCSI for example) to the operating system.

If thats the case, I'm pretty annoyed that my old drive has a higher value.. is there a configuration setting I could look into to sort this out? Would a reformat help? This is really quite strange..

EDIT: just used HD Tach and got a more respectable burst speed of 230mb? things just got weirder.
 
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Same as mine. Except burst rate is 182MB. I wouldn't worry about it. The drive only does 150MB/s max so a burst rate higher than that will not make a difference. You aren't gonna notice the odd v small cached file going at 180MB/s instead of 150 or even 75.

The F3 is a good drive but it's still just a 7200rpm mechanical one.
 
Thats fair enough, if I wouldn't even notice it then I guess it doesnt matter. Just a bit confused as to why this burst rate is so low compared to everyone elses :/ I hope it isnt going to be prone to failure in the future if its already acting strangely after less than a weeks worth of use
 
Well nothing I can put my finger on considering the normality of the benchmarks (not regarding the slow burst rate compared to everyone elses) but it just seems really lethargic and slow. But I dont know whether its because I'm now Windows 7 instead of Windows XP with just 2Gb of ram. On XP I never had any issue with ram, but I'm aware 2Gb is a bit on the low side for W7.

By lethargic I would describe it as lag. If I double click on something to install for example, it will just sort of sit there for a good 5-10 seconds doing.. seemingly nothing. At first I would go on task manager looking for anything which may not be 'responding' because I thought something had crashed. I have no idea if theres any settings to stop this or what but after coming from a relatively streamlined set up of XP which had no lag what so ever, then upgrading my OS and HDD to 'bigger and better' only to find everything is a lot slower is a bitter (and expensive) pill to swallow.
 
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Just to update, I tried using another SATA cable ...And the burst rate using that is 198mb! So it seems I was using a dodgy cable!

Although I tried running Outrun 2 and the load times are still horrendous compared to when I was on XP, I'm guessing this is a windows 7 thing. I tried using compatibility mode but the loading times dont change. Pretty weird.

I'm glad that it was a cable issue and not the drive being strange though. Can you get different spec sata cables then, which could limit some results like that? Is there say sata 1 cables, sata 2 cables which are a bit quicker, sata 3 which are quicker again, etc? I've ordered a nice new sata 6gbs cable today so that shouldn't be an issue anymore!
 
Duderooni said:
Is there say sata 1 cables, sata 2 cables which are a bit quicker, sata 3 which are quicker again, etc? I've ordered a nice new sata 6gbs cable today so that shouldn't be an issue anymore!
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No, all SATA cables are the same.

You must have just had a faulty cable.

There's no benefit to buying a "SATA 3" cable.
 
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Surveyor said:
No, all SATA cables are the same.

You must have just had a faulty cable.

There's no benefit to buying a "SATA 3" cable.
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Ok, thanks for clearing that up, yeah seems that way.. Ah well it was an Akasa cable for only a couple of quid anyway so I didn't pay through the nose or anything. Don't know whether they're any good or not but seem a common make and aslong as its not faulty, it'll be better than my current cable. :o
 
My F3 drops to 1-2mb occasionaly although Performance hasn't been affected. Maybe its just HDTune playing tricks.
 
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