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
