I've been using a Samsung F1 1TB in my PC for a while now and not had any problems but I've been looking to purchase some storage space for my new home "server/nas".

I've ordered WD20EARS but I've not been able to source WD20EARS-00MVWB0.

Low and behold however, a UK company now has F4EG in stock - I've ordered 2!!! Hopefully, despite no reviews available it wont be a bad choice!!

Should be a nice drive - 667GB platters Should be here on Monday!!

My new server will have to sit idle till then.. no hard drives!!!

Look forward to your review on them. Newegg also seems to have just got them in stock this week.

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Gonna wait a bit for reports to come back on these 667GB/platter drives. Hope both WD and Samung have made reliable drives and not tried to rush this new tech out.

Just ordered one myself as i have 1 f3 2tb already for a few months and its been great. I then bought another 2tb f3 a week ago which has to go back becasue when i turn the computer on the first 3 mins it makes a bad grinding type sound, i think its a bearings as after the 3 min it seems to be fine but not to happy about it.

so back it goes and ordered a f4 as everyone seems to think it will be a better drive than the f3

less power
more reliable as it uses 3 platters instead of 4
same performance as the f3 or if not a littile bit more better
less heat than the f3
less noise than the f3

so it should be a good drive.

I received the 2 drives yesterday and put them into my home build atom NAS. No problems detecting them - but in Linux they are coming up as 512 block - how do I go about formatting them as 4k sector drives?

The Samsung specs say "4K Sector with Emulation"

I am not sure what the jumper does?

I ran out of time unfortunately to do anything more.

The OS will see the drive as having 512B sectors - that's the emulation mentioned in the Samsung specs.

The jumper, I assume, is a workaround to the problem that partitions will be misaligned if you use a windows OS older than Vista. At least that's what the jumper do on 4K sector drives from WD.

Wow... Thanks for the heads-up on the 4k sector. Didn't think Samsung would move to it so soon.

Here's the manual for the HD.

Arrggghhh~~!`1`!~!!!! That manual is useless and doesn't mention anything about the jumper or the 4k sector.

Definitely waiting for reviews/reports on how it plays with XP/2003 before ordering now.

In the WD drives, the 512 sector emulation is automatic and there's no way to disable it, so it's always lying to the OS. In Linux, you had to use parted (not fdisk) to partition it so it'll be aligned corrected.

I had a go yesterday. The initial version of the WD 4k sector drives did report 512 sectors but that was eventually "fixed" with newer drives that report 4k to the OS.

The Samsung reports 512.

Parted can't align the partition for you automatically as it thinks the drive is 512 as that is what it is reporting.

I have used fdisk to align it to sector 64 (instead of sector 63). I have done a quick format on both drives.

Sector 63 (mis-aligned)
Sector 64 (aligned) - 30 seconds quicker

I need to do some benchies to see what the actual usage is like.

Samsung technical support is completely useless. I asked about the jumper and got a reply to do with master/save (IDE hard disks).

There is 2 jumpers on the back, I am not sure what they do. I am not sure if Samsung have any tools etc. to disable the 512 emulation or not!!!

Why u trying to do this I have just bought One of these for my videos backup and using it with windows 7 will I be alright as I have a f3 as well which is a 2tb

Just wondering what all this means ? As I now have a f4 2tb

Are you asking why he's not trying to use it under Win7? It's because he has an existing NAS running Linux and he doesn't want to get a new one (and I'm not sure why he'd get Win7 even if he did).

If that's not what you are asking, I can't figure what it is you are questioning.

tutu - please keep us updated. I am on the verge of buying from newegg, and would love to get a little more feeback before I jump in. BTW, anyone have any idea why the "F4EG" does not appear in the newegg description? I almost missed finding it because of that.

Sorry I was asking what this option does on the drive to be able to work better in a nas setup

Basically if the drive sectors are aligned properly then you will get better performance.

These drives use 4k sectors instead of the usual 512. The drive has some 512 emulation so its "plug and play". But that will not give best performance unless you do some tweaking.

Windows 7 does support 4k sectors but the drive is working in emulation mode (512) so it may not set the drive up optimally.

I have not seen anyone else with this drive yet, so I am right in at the deep end!!!!

I am using 2 of these drives in my own NAS (which I built recently with Atom D525 and Linux). I've only had it since Friday so I am also tweaking that.

I don't speak Japanese:

http://marosama.blogspot.com/2010/08/sa ... 204ui.html

4KB Align 124.507173 IOPS
Not Align 63.516927 IOPS

Anyone can translate??

I take it that write performance is almost double when 4k is aligned.

I used linux to align my only partition to start at sector 64 (not sure why some sites recommend 2048??). I am not sure how to does this with parted. I would like to use a GPT partition table really - but parted can't align automatically I don't think as the drive reports 512 instead of 4k??

Offset 2048 = aligned
Offset 63 = not-aligned

Looking at the benchmarks, reads are not effected by non-alignment, and also no effect on sequential writes. Only effect random, small blocks, which gets a 50% penalty from the read-modify-write operation.

From what he stated, Vista/W7 starts with offset at sector 2048. I also noticed less capacity when I formatted in Vista/W7 vs XP.

I don't think newer WD 4k drives were "fixed" report 4k. If they reported 4k to the OS, then it will not work/recognize for XP, W2k3, or older NAS devices. They all seem to be using this 512B emulation for now, or have a jumper to disable the emulation.

Release non 512-byte sector emulated firmware for WD??EARS

Would like to see Samsung release some information for their implementation of 4k sector emulation and if they're going to release a utility to fix the offset, or say use with Vista/W7 only. The drive itself doesn't even have a warning like the WD advanced drives.

I have done some further digging as you can imagine.

You can either use 64 or 2048 for the first partition (the latter is the Windows7/Mac OS X standard).

I have tried both fdisk at 64 and parted at 2048 and have ended up using parted for GPT on 2048 as it makes sense to make sure the drives will work OK on any Win7 machines/macs in the future. I also might use JBOD for 4TB so I think I need GPT for that instead of MBR.

GPT ends the 2TB partition on 3907029134s (highest was 3907029167 which it couldn't use). What should I set it to??? does it need to be in 4096 blocks? Does it need to be divideable by 8/512?

i just formated it with windows 7 and leaving it at that as i dont realy know all about this tweaking.

would you even get much more performance by doing this and if so why do manufactures not just use it ?

what do youu think of the drives so far ? do you have a f3 2tb to compaire to this f4 2tb

This is how this drive gets partitioned in different utils (all in sectors):

Windows 7
2048 - 3907026943

fdisk (DOS compatibility OFF)
2048 - 3907029167

parted - MBR
2048 - 3907029167

parted - GPT
2048 - 3907029134 (the latter is smaller due to the redundant GPT table at the end)

What should the end be for optimal? Or does the start only matter? I am only using 1 partition.

Incidentally, I tried the jumpers on the drive. The first one stopped the drive from being recognised, the second one had no visible affect in hdparm. This was top/bottom - I didn't try left/right on the jumpers.

Also, Es-Tool 3.01p doesn't work!! Error in there config.sys

OK while searching around (I now need to align my boot drive as well now.. argh as its an SSD - which I got really cheap otherwise I wouldn't have bothered).

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum ... t&p=472998

"No, the total size doesn't need to be dividable.

The effect is that the disk will read or write a few sectors more at the end of the partition. Remember that there are quite a lot of space hidden away from the user and operating system by the disk. Space which the disk uses internally as redundancy and wear levelling.

If you on the other hand miss-align the start of the partition it would effect every read or write done to the partition. For every 4k read done on the file system would result in 8k read on the disk even though it would still return no more than 4k. Large reads and writes is less effected. 8k read done on the file system would only result in 12k read on the disk making it more effective than the 4k case."

So I should be good to go..

I only have a F3 1TB. Windows 7 will align the first partition so you are OK.

Thanks for your insights tutu.

Assuming you purchased it from Scan, would you be able to check the warranty status with the serial number on the Samsung checker?

I know Scan themselves offer a 36 month warranty but it would be useful to know if an RMA can be made with Samsung direct. Many Samsung drives sold by Scan are not covered by Samsung for warranty as they are OEM or unofficial imports.

Thanks

I just bought some from Scan...
They come up HD204UI - 103 - Out of Service area
The product has been brought in from outside of this service region and cannot be serviced. Please contact your reseller or distributor.
Oh well...

i bought them from there what does this mean i have no warrenty ?

also check this forum out someone did some tests

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showth ... p=17302763

hope it helps

Well, as long as I can return it to scan for the next few months that's fine.
If a computer component works for 6mths it tends to go on and work until it's £worthless...
Haven't actually plugged any of my drives in yet - trying to back up TBs off old drives is taking ages...

... and that forum thread is interesting - performance looks pretty tasty.

Hope they work well on my 3ware RAID card.....

Thanks for checking. I suspected this might be the case.



The warranty is with Scan for 36 months without the option of returning direct to Samsung. Scan's warranties usually work on the following basis - if it fails and if at the time of RMA they have stock of the same model of drive, you'll get a replacement. If the drive is no longer produced then you'll get a partial refund based on how long you have had it.

So it's not a huge issue but some people may want the option of doing RMAs with Samsung direct (equal or better replacement offered) for the full 3 year term, in addition to the retailer's warranty.

Scan's prices do tend to be a little lower compared to retailers who sell officially sourced drives, so that's a plus!

Strange, as if u look on Scans site at the f4 2tb drive it says samsung for the 36 month warrenties and the phone number ?

hi folks,

as some peoples have the new samsung f4 2tb already.. can somebody please report about their noise?

the samsung f3 was not really quiet for a 5400 rpm drive, what about the f4 ? is the idle noise quieter now ?

I bought half of dozen of these drives, originally for media but they might replace my caviar blacks now as performance is pretty decent and they run quiet (most of the time) and cool.

First off, I can hear them seek when I run the HDTune read test but they don't cause the case to hum like the blacks do or make weird seeking noises like my old F3's. They are pretty quiet. If you are transferring large files you won't hear the drive much. Lots of small files is a different matter. You will hear it, but it's NOT loud or obtrusive. I am using an 800D case which has no drive dampening. Overall happy with the F4's from an acoustic point of view. I'd say they are even quiet enough for silence enthusiasts if you suspend them or use dampening. According to Samsungs EZTool which recognises these drives there is no AAM support so no way to make the drive quieter via software. I also tried HDTune Pro which shows AAM unchecked and value set to 0. You have the options of setting it to 128 or 256. Neither seems to make a difference.

Temperature wise, they stay around 31-35 degrees C which is approx 7 to 10 degrees cooler then my caviar blacks. Like the WD Green (3 platter design), they probably don't need active cooling. The 800D drive cooling isn't the best so you can knock a few degrees off if using something like a HAF.

Regarding sector size I'm using them currently as data/media drives so I just formatted them using the windows 7 default (which is 512 bytes). If someone can show me how to format them using 4k sectors I'd appreciate it.

Now to performance. Here is a comparison I ran between the Samsung, the WD Green 2TB (WD20EARS-00MVWB0) which also has 3 x 667gb platters, and WD Black 2TB. I formatted each drive for a single partition using the default Windows 7 settings in disk manager, and copied my documents folder and pics folder to each one (About 2GB in total). Each drive was tested from the same SATA port on my Classified motherboard using the latest Intel RST drivers. Tested with latest version of CrystalDiskmark (3.0 x64 Build 2010/3/21), and did read test with latest version of HDTunePro (4.60). OS was Windows 7 Ultimate 64. Boot drive was Crucial C300 256GB SSD.

Note : I have multiple Samsung, WD Green and WD Black drives so redid the tests on those as well in case I got a dodgy Samsung. The results were negligible in each case.

Samsung



WD Green



WD Black

Nice benchmark results thanks, A 2TB F4 Would be mighty tempting if they ever make it to my neck of the woods.

It would be great if you could benchmark NCQ performance for the F4 and even some other drives.

The easiest way I know of to do it is running multiple instances of HD_Speed from http://www.steelbytes.com/?mid=20

Set the block size to 256KB for all instances. Select the right drive.
Run a couple of instances Set Position % at 0 for one and 50 for the other. Hit start and after a minute take a screenshot showing all windows.
If you could do the same with 3 instances at 0, 33, 66 and 4 at 0, 25, 50, 75. You should hit the reset button between runs to clear the graph
that would be great.

For comparisons sake heres the results of my early model wd20ears
1: http://img337.imageshack.us/img337/5117/82134069.png
2: http://img822.imageshack.us/img822/2715/26666074.png
3. http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4580/64679672.png
4. http://img517.imageshack.us/img517/5723/36468117.png
10. http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/6280/25961348.png

is the 2TB drive a 3platter one? and so the 1,5TB would be... 2 platter?

thanks

Yes, the F4 series drives have 667GB platters in them. 3x667GB = 2TB. A two-platter drive would be 2x667GB = 1.33TB. Any 1.5TB would have to be based on three 500GB platters (F3) or else they would have to use 3 platters still and just use 1/3 of the third which wouldn't make any sense. There is a 320GB F4 drive... Assuming this is also a 667GB platter drive, it would be one side of one single platter.