Hardware Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Review

Got that the wrong way round, the read is about the same, slightly slower and the write is slightly faster on the Seagate.

 

Why do you not review Hitachi Drives? I'd like to see a review of their new 2TB drive

 

I just bought one of these Thanks for the review

 

We've already discussed wattage and the pointless nature of measuring it with consumer HDDs earlier in the thread the differences between drives are within the margin of error of PSUs, even between 5,200 and 7,200 models.

In regards to temperature, there's little to no way of reliably measuring it to generate any meaningful comparison between drives - differences in design mean internal sensors will be different components etc. These drives are rated up to 70°C+ anyhow, and needless to say a 2 platter drive isn't going to throw a huge amount of heat out.

In regards to this review"blowing" - consider this your first warning. That's not an acceptable attitude or way to express your opinion on these forums.

 

It's not out of choice, it's simply having someone at Hitachi to get us products to test!

 

This great review has made picking the HD for my new build later this month sooooo easy

THANKS bit tech, you rule!

 

Ordered mine yesterday, should arrive Monday

 

Thanks for the thorough review, sounds like a great drive.
I find myself reading the review after finding a bad sector in my Samsung F1 using HD Tune.
I'm now in a dilemma as to risk getting another samsung seeing as i've only had this one for a year, maybe im unlucky?
Does the existance of 1 bad sector mean my F1 is close to total failure?

 

Just bought two of these beasts, set them in Raid 0, ghosted over my operating system and bingo- the best upgrade a hundred quid will buy you.
Serious performance under Windows 7 boots to log on screen in 23 Seconds, tested with HD Tach 3.04 gives 245Mb average read speed, and on one occassion I have no idea why 1895mb burst speed although retesting reveals its a shade under 400mb - Savage stuff compared to what I used to.
Buy This people SSD's aren't in this class for value and speed!

 

Value yes, speed no. Just because HD tach says it delivers 245MB/s average read doesnt mean that's what you'll get. In my experience RAID only gives you performance boosts when dealing with consecutive files (such as writing/copying batches of MP3s, ISO files etc) but in circumstances where response speed is more important (booting windows, loading games) SSDs can't be touched.

Don't get me wrong - the F3 is the best hard disk drive out there but for performance it's still no substitute for a decent SSD - if only they were more affordable

 

I've been using Western Digital drives mostly for the past few years (very reliable) and the odd Seagate (not quite so reliable with the firmware issues last year).

I wanted a new fast main drive and decided to try the Samsung F3.

I firmly believe the manufacturer should provide a utility for setting up a new drive including copying the contents across to make it the boot drive - I don't see why people should have to go through the hassle of a complete reinstall. With WD and Seagate their software has worked well for me and 90% of data gets copied properly. MS Office always needed a reinstall for some reason but that was a small inconvenience.

So I hooked up the F3 and already had Ontrack Diskeeper installed (from Samsungs website). Diskeeper took nearly 2 hours to install and copy the 200gb from my WD2500AAKS main drive. Booting up the Samsung led to a 'disk error' - I did the whole process again and again it wouldnt boot. I downloaded Acronis True Image and that did the process in half the time and now the Samsung booted up cleanly and all programs Ive tried so far including MS Office work fine.

I benched my drives with HDTach after a thorough defrag and ....
Seagate 500GB 7200.11 32mb cache - 12.2ms seek - 94.3 MB/s average read - 247.4 MB/s burst
Samsung F3 1TB 32mb cache - 13.5ms seek - 118.9 MB/s average read - 254.6 MB/s burst

As for noise - the WD was very quiet - the Seagate is audible but still quiet - the Samsung F3 is very audible. I wouldnt call it noisy like a Raptor but its certainly noisier than the others and you probably wouldnt want it in a Home Theatre PC. As for reliability - only time will tell.

So IMHO - it IS fast - its noisy and the provided software is crap - if I had the option to return it I'd probably go with a WD or Seagate.

 

Received and installed F3 today, ran out of space on rest of my hdds (2x 500gb samsungs and 640 gb WD) I love that F3, might buy another one after xmas

 

I haven't heard my F3 whoop, but you can definitely hear it when it is writing to the disc.
My only concern was that when I am playing LOTRO I get very small lag spikes every time it writes to the drive.
I also just had some weird porblem where it could not detect the disc. I had to restart it several times before it started to boot and then ran disc check.

 

If you regularly back up with Ghost or something... you could just restore your image to the new drive with that... then you wouldn't have to put up with 90% of data being copied properly!! What's THAT about? I could fit a new drive in my rig now, restore using Ghost and 100% of everything would be there as if nothing had happened.

 

this is the most obvious choice for storage atm, cheap performance!

I bought 4!

 

I did a Ghost with my single 1TB Samsung F1 and bought 3 x 1TB Samsung F3 and created a RAID 1 with two of them and restored with ghost but then it BSODs with 7B.... as the previous windows had not installed the RAID drivers.


Now I have installed Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.9 and RAID support on the F1 it boots up from the Gigabyte Jmicron SATA2/RAID controller on the Gigabyte P35-DQ6 motherboard and then I can access the F3 on the Intel ICH9R controller but of what I understand it very difficult to change the registry afterwards on it, which need just a couple of lines changed.



I want to do a simple raid 1 upgrade.