Any news on the Samsung 1TB F1, I am getting one tomorrow but I cant do the SPCR testing.


Andy

I too am considering buying a Samsung F1 1TB as well, it is el cheapo on NewEgg atm @ $280.

Burn the image of the Samsung HUtil to a cd and boot from it to test the F1 when you get it. Hopefully your drive won't have the errors that many people are experiencing.

I've had one of these drives for some time now, and am very pleased with it. I just added a second one, which was making much more noise. I was disappointed and frustrated. I could hear the drive over all the ambient noise including my tv and fridge.

As it turns out AAM was set all the way to the speed setting and not the silent setting, which was different from how the first drive was set from the factory.

If you want these drives to be quiet remember to set AAM.

I'm still investigating this, but from a price/performance/quietness standpoint, it appears I still have no compelling reason to upgrade my 120GB IDE Samsung Spinpoint P80 with Nidec motor.

I don't need the capacity; it draws relatively low power for a 3.5" drive, idle or seek; it is still one of the quietest drives out there, idle or seek; the performance hasn't been far enough eclipsed amongst 7200 RPM quiet, budget drives to warrant an upgrade. Yes, the 7K1000 obliterates my P80 (and yes, I know the comparison uses the 160 SATA version instead of the 120 IDE version, but that shouldn't make much of a difference, should it?) in I/Os per second, but it's louder and costs three times as much as the P80 did when it was new.

For a user with my needs, HDD development has done little to impress over the past few years. Admittedly, I need to research this more, including the real-world performance difference I can expect to see between two, three, or even close to four hundred more I/Os per second.

Edit: added another HDD for comparison in the link.

Great review, as always! That's 2 1TB models reviewed, now ony F1 and 7200.11 left Doubt any of them will beat WD GP (silence wise) but F1 should be close.

Obviously, you have not done any video editing. I assure you, recent advances in HDD development (dropping price, size and speed increases) are much appreciated by those of us that edit video.

I agree with what Pauli said, HDD progressed very well in recent years from top to bottom. As for low-end, my Hitachi 7K160 blew away my Samsung P80(not Nidec one, a little noisier), Seagate 7200.7, Hitachi 7K80, and Maxtor DM9 with good suspension from combined price/performance/quietness perspective.

But P80 is the best one concerning idle noise only, 7K160 just barely tails it. I am not a native speaker of English, sorry. I hope you understand what I intend to express.

Which errors are those? I'm asking because this will probably be my next drive also.

I'm looking forward to the SPCR review of the Samsung F1 1TB drive.

I thought I would add my comments about my experience with Hitachi drives. I have 9 various hitachi drives right now across 2 computers for the past 3 years.

I have only had hardware problems in two of the drives, and that was my fault. While making/testing a heatsink suspension, I dropped the drives while they were running (only about 2 cm) but that was enough to cause the heads to skip and damage some media. Ironically, the two drives continued to function fine. I only noticed once I started running Ubuntu linux and noting the slow but sporatic errors that would show up. After running the diagnostics at the behest of Hitachi tech support, they told me both drives had errors that matched a drop pattern. They still replaced both drives under warrantee.

I am running 4 x 250MB Hitachi drives in my media PC. That spin down idle function really works well. The unit is almost silent in my P180 case (holding 6 drives total). When the recorder powers up (or I access the drive shares), it takes about 2 seconds, I hear the heads click into place, and the drives are up and running (still quiet in the P180 case).

My main PC has 3 of these drives in it. They also spin down while I'm surfing the internet etc... Unless you're doing some heavy work on the PC all the time, the drives really do spend most of their time spun down. I suspect it will also lengthen the life of the drives... less power, less heat, longer life.

Based on my experiences, I wouldn't hesitate to buy another Hitachi.

I'm surprised none of the other manufacturers have this feature.