Samsung F3 reliability?

fluffmyster

fluffmyster

fluffmyster

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6 Feb 2009
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I'm on the hunt for a new drive and before anybody says try google I'm aware that the F3's are much better than the old F2's but I have recently heard about some failures.

Can anybody comment on their experience with the F3's please as I'm looking to replace my 640Gb caviar black and the price / capacity / performance of the 1Tb F3 makes it seem like an ideal candidate.

Thanks
 
I've used maybe 12-15 F3s in builds, all 500GB models iirc. I'm using 3 in my pc currently. Nothing to report :)

I think all hard drives are pot luck. The 1TB versions are probably 2 platters of 500GB? May run a tad hotter though my F3s are around 32c full pelt
 
I have 1 F3 and 2 F1 1TB drives. Not had a problem with them and I plan to get a couple 2TB F4's when they are released.

I will be doubling up on all HDD from now on, for the cost of storage it is not worth risking it IMO.
 
All hard drives are pot luck these days. None are particularly worse reliability wise than others.

True you will hear horror stories from people about having 10 drives of the same make die the same day and other such things but generally each manufacturer is about roughly the same.

Occasionally you will get a certain model with a defect such as the infamous IBM "deathstars"..... which tarnished the entire range even though the problem was pretty specific to a couple of models.

I personally use samsung drives and *touch wood* have not had a single one die on me yet.

I have an internal bay for mine and they are air cooled and never go above 30oC so maybe that helps mine? who knows :D
 
i've been using spinpoints for at least 5 years now.

used WB and IBM/Hitachi before that.

never had one fail on me yet, and i have quite a few, im prolly running about 15 or so drives atm (at a guess) and there all spinpoints of various types
 
I've got two Samsung 2TB drives in my home server and they are both fine. Thats more than can be said for the two 750GB Barracudas that they replaced.
 
Very happy with my 1TB F3 had no issues with it.

The drive is used as my primary C: and has 4590 hours power on hours shown in CrystalDiskInfo.
 
Well I've read some promising stuff but obviously still with the odd negative story. At the time of building my PC I chose the 640Gb Caviar Black over the F2 1Tb for the reliability and over a year on it is still rock solid and just showed 100% healthy blocks in the HD Tune error scan.

However, I can't afford to be picky atm so I'm pretty much limited to the F3 1Tb for the price. The alternative would be to get another 640Gb Caviar Black for raid 0 which is actually a tad more expensive than the F3 but not a big deal.

So my options are: [1] F3 1Tb for £45. Sell my current drive to make for a very cheap upgrade or keep it for backup.
[2] Get another 640Gb Caviar Black for raid 0 for £50. Upside is 280Gb more space and more performance. Downside is not having a drive for backup, to sell or to hold current data while installing raid.

So option 1 or 2 guys?
 
I had my first F3 fail on me within a month. Exhibited a really weird problem whereby it'd fail to boot unless I detached the SATA cable and then re-connected it a few seconds after power-on.

Have had two more since which are still running without problems.

TBH, all hard drives have roughly similar failure rates, user recommendations are largely subjective, based on what drives they've had themselves. My recommendation is to use a good backup strategy and don't trust your hard drive at all.
 
I have two F3 1TB and just sold my F1 320gb to my brother, all perfect. :)

A pair of F3 1TB provides a surprisingly quick setup when connected in RAID0 apparantly. I would do it with mine but they're full of stuff. :(
 
Ive used two T166s, two F1s, and two F3s so far, I had one T166 and one F1 fail.

The F3s have been fine though.

Hard drive failure is going to be the same across all brands, they are the most likely part to fail, so always have a backup drive.
 
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