We've put more than 70 F1 1TB drives in service the last year, with a grand total of ONE failed drive, which was DOA. So its safe to say that the 1TB variant is pretty good.

However, the track record with the 750GB drives are not that good, with a substantially higher failure rate. I suspect problems with the 250GB platters used in these. Thus I'd also avoid the F1 500GB ... No point in buying either, really, as the 640GB is faster than both.

Thank you. Hearing that has made me very happy.

So I called Samsung today and they told me they will do an RMA for me. However, I will get a refurbished hard drive.

Should I take it? I'm so scared of refurbs.

Hmmmna... first it seemed like it was the 334Gb platters that were dodgy, now someone says the 250Gb ones aren't safe.

I've had no problems with the three 500Gb F1s I've installed so far. I can only hope it was a problem with earlier batches, that Samsung have now fixed.

I have a Samsung F1 1TB drive and it seems to have some detection problems when starting the PC from cold boot, either it detects the drive 30seconds after or fails to detect it at all, rebooting the system again makes detection work normally, is this a known issue with samsung drives?

This seems related to the MB's chipset. I wanted to sell my F1 750GB to my dad. The drive had worked in my server fine for many months, but I needed to replace it with a larger drive. He has a Asus MB with a nForce3 chipset. It did not recognize the drive. Set the SATA interface to SATA1 instead of SATA2. It did recognize the drive... sometimes. Exactly the same behavior you describe. Never managed to install any OS on the drive. Took it back home. Put it in my desktop and I have no recognition problems at all (Intel P35 chipset). HUtil did give me the Check M.C. error though.