Quick Consumer Query

Fnz

I'm looking for a good value, good performance hard drive. Currently have the 750GB Spinpoint F1 - which I should probably format at this stage. Is there any reason not to go with the 1TB Spinpoint F3 - beyond the minimal capacity upgrade?

I was considering the 2TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K2000 but one too many people mentioned noise concerns. Shame Samsung don't have larger, high-performance, versions of the F3 - just, what basically amounts to, a mislabelled F2.

Deano12345

The 2TB F3's are quicker than the comparable F2 drive.

F2 1.5 TB :



F3 2TB :



Not that noticable in terms in I/OP but look at the access time difference,this access time is what makes a drive ''feel'' quick.

Deans top tip for the day (:p),get 2x1TB's and put them in RAID0,you could have these sort of speeds :

PogMoThoin

I'd stick with Samsung, I've 4x f1's and swear by them. The 1TB f3's can be got for great prices
http://www4.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=28152&agid=689

BTW, that 2TB is only 5400rpm

Fnz

Wah, my throw-away comment got way too much attention... feckin' graphs n' stuff!

Thought it weird that Samsung decided to label the 2TB drive with the F3 brand when the F2 seems a more natural fit. Not that I'm ever surprised by stupid naming decisions in the tech world.

Where did you get those graphs - is RAID0 much faster than a single F3?

Deano12345

Fnz wrote: »

Wah, my throw-away comment got way too much attention... feckin' graphs n' stuff!

Thought it weird that Samsung decided to label the 2TB drive with the F3 brand when the F2 seems a more natural fit. Not that I'm ever surprised by stupid naming decisions in the tech world.

Where did you get those graphs - is RAID0 much faster than a single F3?

Google image search.

Yes,2 F3's in Raid are much quicker,about 200mb read/write.And if you short stroke them,very quick in real world apps

witnessmenow

I remember someone saying here a while back about raid 0

"its called raid 0 because that's exactly how much data you can recover if one of them fails"

youcancallmeal

I have 2 of the 2TB Samsung F3(HD203WI) running in RAID 1 and if they havent been accesed in a while then the spin up time is painfully slow (> 5 secs), besides that they have been fine so far and are surprisingly quiet.

Solitaire

I've never seen a 2TB F3 anywhere... Samsung and most e-tailers with a brain-cell call them Samsung HD203WI, which are considered a SoHo/light-enterprise revision of the 2TB F2 (EcoGreen). Real F3s are characterized by a 7200RPM spin, relatively low power usage and fast seek times and sustained/burst read/write speeds (sustained read can approach a Velociraptor!) at the cost of terrible I/O ops (definitely not a business-oriented drive then!). Toms was moaning because there was still no sign of a real honest-to-God 2TB F3 anywhere!

Fnz

Solitaire wrote: »

Toms was moaning because there was still no sign of a real honest-to-God 2TB F3 anywhere!

Yeah, I'm getting fed up, waiting for larger capacity (7200rpm) F3 drives.