single drive speed , F1 vs aaks vs seagate single platter

ih8modem

ih8modem

ih8modem

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Three questions :

Part 1 - Out of these 4 drives, which is the fastest in a single drive mode. Not in RAID, just plain 1 drive connected to 1 SATA port.

Seagate ST3320613AS 320GB single platter
WD3200AAKS 320GB single platter
WD6400AAKS 640GB double platter
Samsung F1 1TB triple platter

Part 2 - reliability.

Out of the 4 drives above, which are most reliable? Searching the WWW it seems the latest batch of ST3320613AS are failing pretty often. I also find quite a few reports of issues with the Samsung F1 drives. That leaves me to believe the best investment is one of the two WD drives.

Part 3 - Performance in RAID - purely for gaming such as Flight Sim X

Would a single 6400aaks outperform a RAID0 2x3200aaks?

I would have included the F1 320GB in this question session, but it seems they are scarcer than the proverbial hen's tooth.
 
Reports about problems with the F1 mainly relate to an older version of Samsungs utility misreporting bad sectors.

WD6400AAKS is faster than the WD3200AAKS which is apparently intentionally limited by WD (anandtech review). The F1 and WD6400AAKS are very close so forget speed and choose based on the capacity you want. Every bench of the Seagates I've seen has shown rather high access times and after several generations of crap drives from them I'm not convinced.

RAID0 won't improve gaming performance at all, only lower loading times by several seconds at most.
 
I'm curious about this aswell. I have that Seagate drive waiting at my parents house, i'll be putting it into my computer this weekend and praying its not one of the ones that fail! Ive just had to send a Maxtor drive back to Seagate because it failed (Seagate own Maxtor) so i dont want to have to do that again any time soon!

Fingers crossed anyway!
 
robjf, what was your experience like with the Seagate RMA service. Was there an advanced RMA option, did you post it abroad or to a UK address and how long before you got a new drive?
I'm building an array for some that insists on Seagates for the 5 year wrranty (who uses drives for 5 years?!) and want to convince them that it's a bad idea. With Samsung a brand new drive arrives in 2-3 days.
 
I'm waiting on the RMA now. Basically there is about 1% of the disk which is causing problems (fails all the tests in SeaTools) and theyve been very prompt with replying to my emails. They even rang me as i said (being a student) i couldnt afford to ring them!

They have given me the address and reference number for the return but i'm holding off until after the weekend when im getting the drive mentioned above. Also ive just emailed them asking for the possibility of an advanced RMA as i dont have any of the packaging they want me to return it with, and quite frankly i cant be bothered to find it all, it should have worked to begin with! The only problem i can see with me returning the drive is that they will normally only send you a repaired drive, not a brand new one, which i think is a bit unfair but nevermind.

Ill update this thread (or start a new one) once the RMA has been sorted to give you an idea of how it went :) So far theyve been very polite and very prompt at replying to emails/calling me.
 
Hi, I'm certainly no expert but i had a similar question to you with regards to the fastest harddrive for around £100. I ended up going for the F1 1TB over the 6400AAKS as they almost perform the same and are unbeatable in terms of value. Perhaps you might want to take a look at this thread.
 
ordered Samsung 1tb and 3200aaks

I have ordered a WD3200AAKS and a Samsung 1TB F1. Will see how they pan out.

I'm half tempted to order a WD6400AAKS for the hell of it, just to benchmark it against these two.
 
FYI

Gigabyte P965 DS3 , 4GB RAM , Vista Home Premium , attached to same ICH8 port for all 3. In each case the drive is just attached, nothing on it at all. The boot drive is a WD2500
Samsung F1 1TB 3x334MB platters
SamsungF11TBHD_Tach.jpg

HDTune_Benchmark_SAMSUNG_HD103UJ.png


WD6400AAKS 2 x 320GB platters
wd6400aaks.jpg

HDTune_Benchmark_WDC_WD6400AAKS-00A.png


WD3200AAKS - 1 x 320GB platter
wd3200aaks.jpg

HDTune_Benchmark_WDC_WD3200AAKS-00B.png
 
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