Samsung F4 2TB Drive any good ?

bhavv · 15 Sep 2010 at 16:30

Samsung F3s arent noisy.

kona786 · 15 Sep 2010 at 16:31

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.

Im sure i used Windows 32 bit OS: WD Align System Utility - Powered by Paragon when i istalled my w20ears on xp.

bhavv · 15 Sep 2010 at 17:16

Hmmm, when I got my Segate drive, backing up 800 Gb of data from a non raided F3 to it took two full days.

Right now, copying 500 Gb from the Raid 0 to an F4 took about 50 minutes. Maybe copy pasting is a lot faster than backing up.

Flanno · 15 Sep 2010 at 17:47

R5GTT said:
My F3's transfer a fair bit of humming through the hot swaps in my case which i find a little annoying. Would be nice to know what the F4's are like vibration wise with them being a lower rpm.
I always wondered if the WD's with the spindle held at both ends also reduced some vibration but heard that the seek noise is fairly loud on them.

Indeed. I had same problem before. While I don't consider the F3's noisy they do cause some unusual case resonance. So far no vibration from F4's amd quieter then the touchless WD's I had.

bhavv · 15 Sep 2010 at 17:52

Somethings wrong with one of my F4s:

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

Flanno · 15 Sep 2010 at 18:01

That's normal. It depends where the bench is reading and writing from on the disk. When your disk was new and you copied only 42gig data over, it filled it from the outside where performance is fastest. As you add more data performance slows down as the heads move inwards. That's why I did my benches on drives with the same 2TB of data copied over.

Run HDTune and see what it says. It shows performance beginning on the outside and moving inwards.

bhavv · 15 Sep 2010 at 18:33

Seems ok, just a small difference which is probably due to having backups on one.

Flanno · 15 Sep 2010 at 18:39

Indeed. I'd leave it alone for now or you will drive yourself mad. I have 6 of them and went through the same as you :eek:

bhavv · 15 Sep 2010 at 18:59

I could have actually kept the Seagate then and just gotten one of these oops.

I didnt realise it was going slower because of how full it was, but never mind, I can try sell it anyway, and all my hard drives are Samsungs now

Now you have no idea how mad I will be if this lot ever gets full :x

I have no more space for hard drives in my case, all full.

6 Tb of storage including Raid 0 for games for just a little bit more than a 128 Gb SSD o.O

I'm not going to bother with larger SSDs until they are much much cheaper. My loading times in games are vastly improved on the Raid 0 and it feels fast enough now.

HeX · 15 Sep 2010 at 21:04

Here's mine with 800GB+ of data dumped on it

Tally's nicely with what you were getting on yours bhavv

Well chuffed with it, so quiet! :cool:

R5GTT · 16 Sep 2010 at 08:11

Flanno said:
Indeed. I had same problem before. While I don't consider the F3's noisy they do cause some unusual case resonance. So far no vibration from F4's amd quieter then the touchless WD's I had.

Thanks for that Flanno, good to know I'm not the only one and the F4's are sounding like a very good buy.

Out of interest does anyone have a couple of F4's in RAID 0 yet? and possibly some CDM results?

psd99 · 16 Sep 2010 at 09:52

Well not sure whether to jump ship just yet

I'm looking to replace my 4 X 500GB drives with 3 X 2TB drives

I wonder if the price will get to less than £70 or £75 for these new drives

jbloggs · 16 Sep 2010 at 11:07

Anybody using the Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB (HD204UI) with WHS (just for storage, ie pool HDD, not system), if so, did you have any problems installing it and does it run ok with the other (512 byte sector) HDD's?

Generious · 16 Sep 2010 at 12:44

jbloggs said:
Anybody using the Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB (HD204UI) with WHS (just for storage, ie pool HDD, not system), if so, did you have any problems installing it and does it run ok with the other (512 byte sector) HDD's?

Not yet putting in a order today will give it a bash when I have them in a couple of days.

WHS is pretty flexible with most disks that get added into the storage pool the ones I avoid on WHS are the WD green disks horrible disks.

I have a couple of F1, F2, and F3's, and a couple of Barracuda's in the storage pool and all working great together mix of 5400/7200 disks.

Lunatic Dreyfus · 16 Sep 2010 at 16:42

In order. F2 1.5TB, F3 2 TB, 500GB 2.5inch WD Scoprio Blue and one of my 2 new F4's.

The Two F4's are now the main storage for my HTPC and they are so much more responsive in Media Browser than the F2/F3 combo that I used before. Those are now relegated to back up duties, which unfortunately take an age.

In fact I'm half tempted to offload these drives and get another pair of F4's...

The F2 is looking a trifle ropey here though...

hifreak · 16 Sep 2010 at 22:07

Have anyone tried to use these in a Synology NAS?

R5GTT · 17 Sep 2010 at 09:42

hifreak said:
Have anyone tried to use these in a Synology NAS?

Got one coming with a synology NAS tomorrow, wasn't sure whether to put the F4 in my rig but think I will try it in the NAS. Hopefully it will work ok.

hifreak · 17 Sep 2010 at 09:48

R5GTT said:
Got one coming with a synology NAS tomorrow, wasn't sure whether to put the F4 in my rig but think I will try it in the NAS. Hopefully it will work ok.

Sounds great please write when you tried that. I am exited to hear, because these disk have not yet been tested with Synology

R5GTT · 17 Sep 2010 at 09:51

Yep, I'll reply here with the results

R5GTT · 18 Sep 2010 at 11:54

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.