Samsung F4 2TB Drive any good ?

Ordered two of these last week on the 'This week only' after needing to replace my external back up system. Will be going into a raid enclosure. Will give an opinion on them when they're up and running.
 
Verbatim USB 3.0 Desktop Hard Drive 2TB has Samsung HD204UI (reported by operating system).

1. That hard drive needs a firmware update, otherwise data might be lost according to Samsung:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386

However, it is not possible to apply Samsung firmware fix, because Samsung software (patch tool) does not recognize the drive, when it is in Verbatim USB enclosure.

I tried it even with USBASPI V2.20 MS-DOS Driver:
http://hddguru.com/software/2006.02.09-USBASPI-MS-DOS-Driver/
to no avail.

It is not possible to remove the hard drive from the enclosure in order to apply the fix, without loosing warranty, as there is "Warranty void if broken" sticker.

Is there any software, which would allow to update the firmware of the Samsung HD204UI hard drive without removing it from the enclosure?

Because of USB enclosure it is also not possible to use any tool for testing the hard drive surface (and SMART status), including Samsung's diagnostic software: ESTOOL v. 3.01 and MHDD (with ASPI driver it can detect it, but says 'drive not ready')

Any idea how to get around this?

2. Verbatim in their Quick Start Guide says (in capital bold letters):
"Verbatim will not be liable for data loss or any incidental, consequential or special damages, however caused, for breach of warranties or otherwise."

However, I believe that Verbatim cannot deny its liability for data loss in this case, because Verbatim is selling a faulty product (with a known fault, which can be fixed only by firmware update or hard drive exchange to a newer revision), and Verbatim, so far, has not provided any solution.

3. Samsung HD204UI hard drive, as most of other 2 TB hard drives is built in Advanced Format:
http://www.samsung.com/global/busin...=94&subtype=98&model_cd=552&tab=fea&ppmi=1219

This means that it needs to have partitions properly aligned, otherwise it might work considerably slower and cause other problems.
This is so because with the emulation of 512B sectors, there is the risk that a partition could be misaligned compared to the 4K physical sectors - where it would be unwittingly started in the middle of such a sector. As a result, the clusters of a file system on that partition would end up straddling 4K sectors, which would cause performance problems.

Verbatim is providing the drive pre-formatted to FAT 32. But have they aligned it properly?
I think they should warn their customers about that aligning problem (particularly if someone would like to change formatting for example to NTFS).
Partitioning the hard drive under Windows 7 should align it properly. But Verbatim could provide their customers with a special tool from Acronis and/or Paragon to align the partitions (like WD did).

You can read more about Advanced Format HDs and the alignment problem on those pages:
http://seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp613_transition_to_4k_sectors.pdf
http://consumer.media.seagate.com/2010/03/the-digital-den/4k-sector-hard-drive-primer/
http://seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/mb604_4k_transition_faq.pdf
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2888
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jimmymay/ar...ignment-make-the-case-with-this-template.aspx

4. Last but not least: why is warranty for Verbatim product lasting only 2 years in the European Union (and in most of other places in the world), while in USA warranty lasts 7 years: http://www.verbatim.com/UserFiles/File/Hardware Limited 7-Year Warranty.pdf
http://www.verbatim.com/prod/hard-drives/desktop/usb-3.0/ ?

Why do they discriminate Europeans regarding warranty so grossly?
 
I've been running 2 of the EG drives in my QNAP 410 NAS and tbh they are pretty silent, I've just put 2 more in and I'm migrating to a RAID 5 array, at the moment I can heard the drives as all 4 are being accessed but under normal usage I don't hear them at all. Critically neither does my wife which is important as the NAS box is in the bedroom :)
 
I have my new F4EG 2 TB backup HDD. Backed up 1.3 TiB of data (took nearly a day!), got about 450 GiB free. Was fairly quiet although I could hear it since it wasn't in my PC or in an enclosure. My internal drives are all silent because they're drowned out by the fans.

I haven't tested the performance for copying files over eSATA yet but will do at some point this weekend. I've already optimally aligned the partition to 4k boundaries using the Paragon (I think) Alignment Tool, which I also did with my WD Green Advanced Format drive. It provided a decent improvement in performance in that case (from about 75 MB/s to 90 MB/s on average for file copying) so I have high hopes for the F4EG!

Will post here if I have any problems but so far, so good. :)
 
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Hi there

I bought 2 of these and used windows 7 pro to make a single partition on both drives would that be ok to get the best performance ? Or do I need to use a tool to format it properly to aline the drive ?

Thanks
 
Meridiusuk said:
Hi there

I bought 2 of these and used windows 7 pro to make a single partition on both drives would that be ok to get the best performance ? Or do I need to use a tool to format it properly to aline the drive ?

Thanks
Click to expand...


Should be ok, although I believe I've seen somewhere a post of someone who claimed that even after partitioning in Win 7, either Acronis or Paragon software still reported that it needs to be aligned. Partitioning makes the align not formatting.
 
Meridiusuk said:
So how would I know of it's done right ?
Click to expand...

Try Microsoft's Sector Inspector to examine the partition table and boot sector:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/SecInspect.zip

Extract the above archive to the one folder and execute the SIrun.bat file. The procedure will generate a report file named SIout.txt. If the boot sector is located at LBA 2048 rather than 63, then this would suggest that the partition is aligned.
 
There have been tested 5 hard drives using different tests (mainly surface access times tests):

1. Samsung HD204UI in Verbatim 2 TB 3.0 USB enclosure.
2. Samsung SP1614N
3. WDC WD6400AAKS
4. WDC WD1600BEVS
5. Seagate ST320410A

The tests results are in 149 files of the screenshots of these tests, available to download in this thread:
http://forum.hddguru.com/surface-test-hdds-t18575.html

1. Generally Samsung drives (even the new 2TB Samsung HD204UI) seem to have considerably poorer quality of the surface comparing to the 3 years old (or so) Western Digital WDC WD6400AAKS.

2. I would like to see similar tests, in particular of other brands and models of 2 TB hard drives. Please upload your tests results in that thread (click the link above).

3. I wonder why in some hard drives slower access times can bee seen aligning in some diagonal patterns (in HD204UI) and why in some other drives (in WDC WD1600BEVS) a checkered pattern appears (only from the second half of the scan) which "shape" changes regularly depending on the part of the disk surface scanned, while in some other drives no such regular patterns are present?

4. Why is there such a difference in SMART status health notification between various software for Samsung SP1614N (it is red for most of the tests in HDD Health and everything OK in HD Tune)? There is also a significant difference in MHDD scan result and HDDScan result for SP1614N.

5. BTW, it took ca. 31 h to test Samsung HD204UI in Verbatim 2 TB 3.0 USB enclosure on USB 2.0 port.
 
terryuk22 said:
THESE have the 4k cluster so how do you format and use under windows xp
Click to expand...

Samsung have an application on their web site that will make the clusters 4k for you:

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_aft.html

I'm also going to be purchasing a 2tb drive when I get paid - it's mainly as a backup so I have somewhere to whack on my growing Photos as well as my Music collection and not have to lose it all with a format.

I currently have an 80gb Caviar Green which is too small for my photos and my Music and a 1tb Caviar Black. I still remember when the 80gb was more than enough space back in the day :(

What will make me decide on my next 2tb is the performance above all else - I want it to be fast so I don't care too much about power usage - and I'm looking at Samsung and Western Digital Drives at the moment before I make a purchasing decision.

Kind Regards
 
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