1.5 TB Samsung EcoGreen F2 HD154UI Slow Access Times

timmyotule · Post by **timmyotule** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 10:25 am

I just picked up a HD154UI and installed Windows 7 on it. The average access times are in the high twenty millisecond range:

Are there any settings I can look at changing or driver updates that could correct this? Or should I return it for another drive (which unfortunately means an hour drive to Frys)?

I have two other HDs in the computer at the moment that both have around 15ms access times.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 1:52 pm

Something is accessing the drive during your benchmark. The most common reason for this based on your description is

The Samsung HD154UI is your boot drive and the "two other HDs" are not.

It isn't valid to test a drive that is being accessed by any program other than the benchmark and compare those results to manufacturers specifications or other benchmark results you find on the internet. Normal benchmark procedure would be:

1. Open the package
2. connect to a controller and PSU
3. Benchmark
4. use the drive

You seem to have reversed 4 and 3 which is why you are seeing "bad" access time and why your minimum transfer rate is "bad" as well.

There is nothing wrong with your hard drive and you should not return it or exchange it based on this benchmark.

You could consider not using the entire drive aka "short stroking". Reduce the C: partition to something like 20% to 50% of the total drive space and don't ever use the rest of the disk for the life of the drive. If you do that the portion you are using will see faster access times in real world use though programs like HDtune and HDtach won't see the improvement as they ignore partition sizes and benchmark the entire drive.

The next best move is to buy an SSD such as the Intel X25M Generation 2 aka 34nm, Crucial M225 (Indilinx) SSD, or OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) SSD and then use the 1.5TB drive as a storage drive instead of booting Windows 7 from it.

Oh and fwiw the specs on that drive are

Average Seek time(typical) 8.9 ms
Average Latency 5.52 ms

access time in the benchmark is the sum of the two stated specs which would be ~14.42 ms. BIOS, OS, utilities could change the AAM settings and this will affect access times beyond what the drive would do out of the box. If you didn't have the OS on it and it tested below 20ms I'd call that normal even if it wasn't under 15ms let alone the exact 14.42ms they call typical.

timmyotule · Post by **timmyotule** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:13 pm

Thanks for the info. I booted using a different drive with Windows XP and ran HD Tune again and got the following:

That got ride of the dips in the transfer rate from when other programs accessed the HD but the access time is still nearly twice what it should be. Do you still think this drive is alright?

I plan on getting a SSD in the future but it won't be for another year or two until they come down in price.

dhanson865 · Post by **dhanson865** » Tue Oct 27, 2009 2:20 pm

techpowerup shows 25.8 ms http://www.techpowerup.com/?83382

maybe you could change the AAM to speed up the access time?

Q: What is AAM and How do I enable it?
A: AAM is short for Automatic Acoustic Management. What this does is to trade some performance in exchange for reducing seek noise. While it may sound like a questionable sacrifice in the quest for silence, in practice, the performance loss is negligible while the seek noise reduction is remarkable. However, idle noise is unaffected, so this is not a drive silencing cure-all.

Hitachi's Feature Tool (HFT) is the most popular way of enabling it. Most of the drive manufacturers offer software to enable AAM as well, so be sure too look around for that if the HFT does not work for you. NOTE: Not all drives support AAM

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 5:24 am

I've read on another forum that HD154UI get much higher seek times when mounted vertically like in P18x cases. I don't know if there is any truth to it because I never bothered to test for it even though I have several HD15UI's.

Post by **NeilBlanchard** » Thu Oct 29, 2009 6:10 am

Hi,

I wonder if it is plain ol' gravity that would be slowing it down in the vertical orientation?

SleepyBum · Post by **SleepyBum** » Sun Nov 01, 2009 3:54 pm

The HD Tune graph of my drive shows a 13.6 ms access time, which seems normal.

I have 2 of these drives, one from Newegg and one from Fry's, and they have pretty much identical stats.

I haven't had time to post a review on these, been lazy, but I will later. AAM is off by default (256) on the drives I got. They were pretty loud.

Vince39 · Post by **Vince39** » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:20 am

Hello!

Long time lurker registering to share some info with SPCR community. I bought 2 Samsung HDD (1 TB EcoGreen F2 HD103SI) last week, both HDD are identical in every aspect: low noise, almost no vibration, good transfer rate and... slow access speed (~26 ms with AAM "disabled").

I downloaded ES TOOL v3.00 from Samsung, did some testing with AAM settings, HDTach and found this:

AAM / Access Time

- Disabled / ~26 ms
- Fast / ~24 ms
- Quiet / ~17 ms

Is this normal?

TIA

Vince39 · Post by **Vince39** » Wed Nov 04, 2009 10:32 am

Can't post screenshots yet (<3 posts).

Vince39 · Post by **Vince39** » Wed Nov 04, 2009 2:47 pm

HD103SI with AAM "disabled". Access Time: 26.4 ms

HD103SI with AAM "Fast". Access Time: 24.4 ms

HD103SI with AAM "Quiet". Access Time: 17.1 ms"

trxman · Post by **trxman** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 2:05 pm

seems like they turned around those AAM settings.

btw, does anyone have experiance with catastrophically low multithreaded read performance described here:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storag ... html#sect0

xbitlabs guys guessed that it's something about firmware.

any firmware updates from samsung?

embeddedbob · Post by **embeddedbob** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 6:48 am

seemingly.random · Post by **seemingly.random** » Wed Nov 18, 2009 3:24 pm

timmyotule wrote:...
That got ride of the dips in the transfer rate from when other programs accessed the HD but the access time is still nearly twice what it should be. Do you still think this drive is alright?

I plan on getting a SSD in the future but it won't be for another year or two until they come down in price.

I've purchased three of these 1.5tb samsungs. The first had a hdtune graph like SleepyBum's above. So I ordered two more. Both were bad. Had trouble setting aam to fast mode on both unlike the first one. Both passed several tests. One finally failed estool.3.00g and another started to get critical errors in vista. Both had graphs like yours. They were tested multiple times on vista and xp installations as secondary drives that had been zeroed completely (~6 hours). Can't remember the orientation. These two drives are being shipped back to samsung as we speak. I'll post back in a month if the replacements have problems also.

Big drives (>= 1tb) are a crap shoot. I've purchased ~10 and four have been bad. This is disappointing since I've only had one drive go bad out of ~50 in the last 20 years.

I'm waiting on ssd. I wasted a ton of money on syquest drives 15 years ago.

grandpatzer · Post by **grandpatzer** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 2:05 pm

this thread is good for my problem atm:

1: I want to have windows 7 pro on a 200gb partition on a F2, the other partition will be filled with data, will there be big performance loss, currently the access time is 14.6ms, I want to keep it around there.

would the performance of the F2 seek time and other thing get alot worse if only 200gb of 1.3tb is free?

I want to have a cheap harddrive for the secondary pc.
my 250gb and 1.5tb F2 get same access times, the F2 gets higher burst rate and average mb/s read time.

I guess the easier solution is to have my 250gb as OS, but I don't want to keep the 250gb as it's a small and noisy drive and old technology.

seemingly.random · Post by **seemingly.random** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 4:54 pm

grandpatzer wrote:this thread is good for my problem atm:

1: I want to have windows 7 pro on a 200gb partition on a F2, the other partition will be filled with data, will there be big performance loss, currently the access time is 14.6ms, I want to keep it around there.

would the performance of the F2 seek time and other thing get alot worse if only 200gb of 1.3tb is free?

I want to have a cheap harddrive for the secondary pc.
my 250gb and 1.5tb F2 get same access times, the F2 gets higher burst rate and average mb/s read time.

I guess the easier solution is to have my 250gb as OS, but I don't want to keep the 250gb as it's a small and noisy drive and old technology.

You haven't stated what the pc will be used for so I'll assume general use.

If you've got room in the case and the funds, get a 500gb hd. The latest ones have a single platter and consume very little power. The 5400rpm versions might be fast enough. This would be a good compromise for isolating the os, apps and data. It would also give a far amount of download space and provide for redundancy where irreplaceable files could be backed up on the other drive.

The 320gb laptop drives are getting pretty cheap but might not be as responsive.

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:16 pm

I would not use a drive like this as a system drive.

Get an F3 500GB for the system, its alot faster overall.