SPCR review up! http://www.silentpcreview.com/samsung-f4-seagate-xt-2tb Not so surprisingly it's lacking performance, but the noise numbers look great.
So pretty much don't buy it for performance (boot drive) but for file storage it's fine? I'm looking for replace my F1/F3 1TB's 7200RPM with 2 of these. Since I'm not booting from it the decreased performance wont make a huge impact?
If you aren't booting from it then it should be fine for performance. A quiet, power efficient drive is really what you want. I don't understand all the hating on 5400rpm drives. I've got 8 of the Samsung Ecogreen F2s (1.5TB) and they perform great. I have run one as a boot drive before and it worked really well. Of course now I have 6 of them in RAID 5 so the speed is SSD-like...
I've used a Samsung F2 5400 as a Boot drive on a HTPC and several WD Cavair Greens (one 500GB and two 1.5TB) for storage. All have been great. The trick is to know what to expect, they aren't as fast but they're cooler, use slightly less power and (most importantly to me) are much quieter!
Surely pointing your browser towards "Hardware" where this thread is located and browsing a little (or perhaps filtering down the threads with the simple tag system) is just as easy as navigating through your own profile? Also, no, I don't use any of those methods for tracking new posts, I just browse through most sections of the forum keeping a watchful eye. OT: Told you so... It's definitely a good storage drive, but not so great for boot. I suspect that's where we'll have mechanical drives going in the next few years. As SSD's begin to dominate the market of boot drives we'll see a much greater focus on efficient and silent drives (if a little at the expense of performance).
Which I mentioned earlier. But doesn't change the fact, that for media serving an HD content, speed is important.
Meeeeeh it's not like any HD-content would come even close to the bandwidth of even the slowest of hard drives. (well, HD-content in any form that makes sense to store on HDDs)
Bought a couple of these for use in a media server to replace two samsung F1s. Quicker at copying large files, quieter and use less power. Pretty much everything I wanted from them.
Exactly. Uncompressed BluRay rips take about 25MB/s, compressed 1080p movies take about 1MB/s of bandwidth. That's not going to be a problem for any SATA II or later drive. Also if you have more than 1 drive you should be running them in RAID anyway