Samsung F4 2TB Drive any good ?

I bought half of dozen of these drives, originally for media but they might replace my caviar blacks now as performance is pretty decent and they run quiet (most of the time) and cool.

First off, I can hear them seek when I run the HDTune read test but they don't cause the case to hum like the blacks do or make weird seeking noises like my old F3's. They are pretty quiet. If you are transferring large files you won't hear the drive much. Lots of small files is a different matter. You will hear it, but it's NOT loud or obtrusive. I am using an 800D case which has no drive dampening. Overall happy with the F4's from an acoustic point of view. I'd say they are even quiet enough for silence enthusiasts if you suspend them or use dampening. According to Samsungs EZTool which recognises these drives there is no AAM support so no way to make the drive quieter via software. I also tried HDTune Pro which shows AAM unchecked and value set to 0. You have the options of setting it to 128 or 256. Neither seems to make a difference.

Temperature wise, they stay around 31-35 degrees C which is approx 7 to 10 degrees cooler then my caviar blacks. Like the WD Green (3 platter design), they probably don't need active cooling. The 800D drive cooling isn't the best so you can knock a few degrees off if using something like a HAF.

Regarding sector size I'm using them currently as data/media drives so I just formatted them using the windows 7 default (which is 512 bytes). If someone can show me how to format them using 4k sectors I'd appreciate it.

Now to performance. Here is a comparison I ran between the Samsung, the WD Green 2TB (WD20EARS-00MVWB0) which also has 3 x 667gb platters, and WD Black 2TB. I formatted each drive for a single partition using the default Windows 7 settings in disk manager, and copied my documents folder and pics folder to each one (About 2GB in total). Each drive was tested from the same SATA port on my Classified motherboard using the latest Intel RST drivers. Tested with latest version of CrystalDiskmark (3.0 x64 Build 2010/3/21), and did read test with latest version of HDTunePro (4.60). OS was Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Boot drive was Crucial C300 256GB SSD.

Note : I have multiple Samsung, WD Green and WD Black drives so redid the tests on those as well in case I got a dodgy Samsung. The results were negligible in each case.

Samsung



WD Green



WD Black

 
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The speeds on these F4s is immense for an £80 2 Tb eco drive at 5400 RPM.

It really puts that £140 WD black to shame.

7200 RPM 1 - 2 platter F4 drives would be awesome to replace the F3s.

I only have 4 HD slots, but two of these plus two raid 0 F3s will be more than enough for me.

This is my current HD usage:



Thats after I already finished cut / pasting my game backups from the Seagate to the F3s. I'll go through the remaining stuff I have and delete what I dont need anymore.
 
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Still the access time is not the fastest on the Samsungs. I tested 4 of them so far and they are all around 15.6-15.8ms on my system. My blacks vary from 11.6-12ms. Still there is very little in it, when you look at the other stats.
 
Flanno said:
Still the access time is not the fastest on the Samsungs. I tested 4 of them so far and they are all around 15.6-15.8ms on my system. My blacks vary from 11.6-12ms. Still there is very little in it, when you look at the other stats.
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Oh, I didnt spot the access times, is 12 ms much better than the 15.7?

While theres not much difference in performance, there is in the price - £80-85 for the Samsung F4, £141 for the WD Black.

My Seagate LP on the other hand is just dire in comparison, I've only had it for a few weeks and am getting rid of it, just because the F4s are the same price and I should still be able to get around £70 - £75 for the Seagate on Ebay.

After deleting all the stuff I dont need, I still only have 543 gb free on my 2 Tb drive, including a backup image of the Raid.
 
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Flanno said:
Still the access time is not the fastest on the Samsungs. I tested 4 of them so far and they are all around 15.6-15.8ms on my system. My blacks vary from 11.6-12ms. Still there is very little in it, when you look at the other stats.
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They're 5400rpm storage drives, access time is pretty irrelevant but that low for 5400rpm is very good.
 
Does access time impact media streaming or using a drive to store your swap file and temporary internet files ? I wouldn't think it would have much of an effect. Also my C300's will appreciate been given a break by a pair of hot caviar blacks.
 
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Flanno said:
Regarding sector size I'm using them currently as data/media drives so I just formatted them using the windows 7 default (which is 512 bytes). If someone can show me how to format them using 4k sectors I'd appreciate it.
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Just got mine this morning.

When in disk management isn't it just a case of using the Allocation unit size and change it to 4096.

11w3lte.png
 
4096 bytes is the default size windows 7 selects on all drives when you do a quick format. However if you run HDTune afterwards and click the info tab you will see the sector size is still 512 bytes as that is what the drive is reporting to the OS. I must check with the Samsung to see if it's still the same.
 
It looks like you have to manually align the drive according to what I can see on other forums :( Don't know if anyone has actually done it though, but the general consensus according to the specs ("4k with emulation"), is the drive will always reports itself to the OS as 512bytes but internally is a 4k drive. So not sure if there is loss of performance due to this.
 
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Flanno said:
It looks like you have to manually align the drive according to what I can see on other forums :( Don't know if anyone has actually done it though, but the general consensus according to the specs ("4k with emulation"), is the drive will always reports itself to the OS as 512bytes but internally is a 4k drive. So not sure if there is loss of performance due to this.
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There's quite a bit of info in this thread regarding performance loss with the 4k thing. :)

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=59946
 
I'm only using these drives for storage so not really bothered about the speeds...but I've just ran HD Tune on the machine I'm using at the moment.

(not the main machine these are going in)

MB = Asus P5B Deluxe (socket 775)
RAM = 4x1GB Corsair 6400
Graphics = 7600GT
CPU = 6300 @ 1.86GHz
Windows 7 64bit

I had a really high CPU usage when I 1st tried it around 11.5 but it's gone down on the 2nd attempt.

208fiwy.png
 
Wow, I have space :)

spacea.png


But I deleted all my backups and need to do them again.

Lord Alibaski said:
I'm only using these drives for storage so not really bothered about the speeds...
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I thought that too when I got my Seagate, but backing up took a very long time. These F4s are having stuff copied onto them a lot faster.

Flanno said:
Yes. a lot of people talking on that thread about 4k but nothing really conclusive.
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I didnt have any problems with this 4k thing. Installed the drives, ran Windows setup, formatted them, and they work :)
 
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bhavv said:
I didnt have any problems with this 4k thing. Installed the drives, ran Windows setup, formatted them, and they work :)
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The people complaining about 4k don't have problems either. The contention is that if you don't get it aligned to use 4k sectors then you half the performance on random writes. Then again, others are saying it's natively 4k anyway, and the firmware does a 512byte simulation no matter what. Either way it's irrelevant unless using it as an OS drive.

Overall I'm happy with them. I have 2 running in my Corsair hot swap bay along with a pair of C300 SSD's. The drives have been transferring stuff back and forth all day and they are staying at 30 and 31C with the fan running around 800rpm. My Caviar blacks would be running between 41 and 45C and I noticed the label on one of the C300's has shrivelled and started to peel as a result! The other advantage of these F4's is there is a lot less case vibration.
 
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Flanno said:
Yes. a lot of people talking on that thread about 4k but nothing really conclusive. That's the same thrread I posted my benches.
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I guess it's early days with this drive as it's so new, but I'm hoping to see something a little more conclusive. I'm hoping to get one of these drives to replace my F1, it seems like it's quieter and faster which is always good.
Flanno said:
The people complaining about 4k don't have problems either. The contention is that if you don't get it aligned to use 4k sectors then you half the performance on random writes. Then again, others are saying it's natively 4k anyway, and the firmware does a 512byte simulation no matter what. Either way it's irrelevant unless using it as an OS drive.
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Hmm, I was planning to use this as an OS drive, SSD it too expensive right now and 7200rpm drives are too noisy for me.
Flanno said:
Overall I'm happy with them. I have 2 running in my Corsair hot swap bay along with a pair of C300 SSD's. The drives have been transferring stuff back and forth all day and they are staying at 30 and 31C with the fan running around 800rpm. My Caviar blacks would be running between 41 and 45C and I noticed the label on one of the C300's has shrivelled and started to peel as a result! The other advantage of these F4's is there is a lot less case vibration.
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Nice, my case fan is at a similar speed, it's around 500rpm I think, so I'm sure this will be more than enough to cool a single F4 by the sounds of it. :)
 
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