Has anyone bought one of these: Clicky? Or does anyone know of any reviews anywhere? Or will BT be doing a roundup of what's about in the 2TB segment for those of use with stacks of data or for use as backup/NAS drives? 5400rpm worries me on the speed front, but the aerial density is better than the F3 1TB. Just wanna feel a little more confident before I purchase. There are lots of the usual internetz rumours when you Google it, but nothing from any major sites.
I have asked almost this exact question but without response. After an Internal HD failure, and currently booted from my external, I'm running on borrowed time to replace the dead item. It would be nice if I could find my original post too! Good luck okenobi. I'll follow your thread for the next couple of days but I need to order a replacement very soon. Cheers. c
Samsung Spinpoint: F3 or F4? After an Internal HD failure on my 5 year old iMac G5 (yes it is SATA), I am looking for a large capacity replacement. Initially, I considered the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green, before realising that the 'Black' version was faster. Then I found the 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3, which has met with much acclaim, and seems an absolute bargain at about £50! Having made my mind up, I was about to purchase it when I saw a comment about a 2TB F4 (which spins 3 high density, 667GB platters at 5400rpm). But apart from reading Samsung's own description, I have been unable to find ANY reviews of this thing anywhere! Can anyone point me in the right direction please? Or perhaps offer some general advice? - I'm not a techie in the least; apart from removing the dead Hard Drive a few days ago, all I've ever done is add more memory, so please be gentle with me! P.S. I also need to replace it's CD DVD-R, which expired a long time ago, but I'll research that separately unless someone can point me straight to something from here. Thanks for reading. Any and all help will be very much appreciated. cosicave
If you had read the FAQ you would already know that new users have their posts moderated before they can be viewed publicly, which means one of the lovely mods has to have the time to approve them all. Weekends are often slow. I'm sure there'll be a review coming from BT soonish, they usually keep up with storage like this. Having said that I wouldn't expect earth-shattering performance from a 5400rpm drive.
Thing is though, I'm starting to wonder if larger drives will start focussing on efficient data storage, rather than outright speed. Leaving people wanting the fastest thing to buy an SSD for a boot drive. That said, with 667gig per platter (33% more than the venerable F3 1TB) I was hoping these might at least hold their own. There are 7400rpm 2TB drives AND some with 64mb cache. But they are stupid, stupid money. Could just buy yet another F3, but I really don't have the physical space for a load more drives and if it ever goes into a NAS box, I want the max that's reasonably doable.
Why not get the already released Enterprise level, Western Digital 7200RPM Caviar Black. Such as this one: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=732 I am sure it will be faster than you Samsung 5400RPM HDD.
Yeah, and as an enterprise drive and with the aforementioned spindle speed and extra cache, it'll be mega bucks. No thanks....
It's just ~200$ canadian more. Else, you can get the much much cheaper non-enterprise version: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=733 7200RPM, 64MB of Cache, Caviar Black series.
£125 on Scan. 3 times the price of a 1TB F3. Hmmmm.... Just did some reading here though and older reviews of both the 1.5TB F2 and the Green WD 2TB suggest that despite increased areal density, the drop to 5400rpm kills performance. No good for me. Guess it'll have to be another F3 or two when I run out of space again any minute now!
Yea, that sounds about right.. it's 2TB 7200RPM. If it's out of your budget, then a second 1TB 7200RPM HDD will, as you suggested, be better.
Thanks for your reply Krittik. In the first instance, this forum is not easy to find one's way around. However, I was well aware of the requirement for new contributors' first posts to be moderated. The part of my comment that you picked on was prompted by the length of time this process seems to take, which was/is something of a surprise to me. In future, it might be nice if you tried to help in a more constructive manner, rather than simply patronizing a Newbie. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Meanwhile, I'd like to thank other contributors to this thread, which are helping me to learn a lot. I am coming to the conclusion that the 1TB F3 would be sufficient for my needs, but I'm still hoping to find a review of the F4 before returning from my holiday in two weeks. Thanks everyone.
No offence cosi, but in my experience this forum is one of the easier ones to navigate - we don't even have a subforum structure. I'm sorry you found my reply so critical, but it's so frequently the case that a simple read of the FAQ and a little patience will solve every newbie's problems. As an aside though, I did contribute to the thread.
Well Krikkit, you mention easy to navigate, but so far I have only been able to find my own comments (and therefore any responses I may have received) by clicking on my own name and then 'statistics'! And to anyone not familiar with a forum, such as myself, surely this is not in the least bit intuitive! However, I appreciate your help and guidance.
Aren't you receiving e-mail notification of your post you reply to, or created or those you subscribe to? I always get an e-mail showing me the post title, with what the first person reply to, with a link to allow me to go directly to the article, like so:
See, I navigate by keeping tabs open of the three main subforums I follow, and then simply middle clicking on the "View new posts" button next to the thread title of threads I have posted in, or am watching, and just middle clicking the title of threads that I have not read yet, but am interested in. A lot of people tell me it's an ugly way to browse forums, but it works for me.
The threads where you've posted show up in different color on the listing. On such recent threads the only thing you need to do is to enter the Hardware-forum and click at the thread that looks different. It seems straight forward enough to me Yeah for only drive I'd never get a 5400 RPM one. I currently run a F1 1 TB for software and a Seagate 5900 RPM(?!) 1 TB drive for back up/storage.
That's a good point. Maybe one of these cheap 2TBs would be good for backup. After all if it's in an external enclosure, it'll be slower anyway. Hmmm......
that's how i do it, Email way seems way too messy on the email client. on less visited forums, i subscribe to interesting threads, and then use User CP to see new posts in those threads. back on topic, heard they are really good drives, but i didn't take the chance when ordering 3 2TB drives for my NAS, as it's not on my NAS' supported list. bought 2x F3eco and a 2TB Seagate Ecogreen for my RAID5.
