Samsung F2 HD103SI - 1TB - any experience?

wojtek · Post by **wojtek** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 3:15 am

Hi,

My drives fills up so it's time to buy another 1TB drive. Until now, I was using WD GP (EACS) but I'm curious about those new Samsung F2 - 5400rpm, 32MB cache and 2 platters. Does any of the SPCR'ers have any experience with those drives already? Any comparison with the GP? I mean real life - not benchmarks or review.

Thanks for any info.

ryboto · Post by **ryboto** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 6:30 am

I am also curious. I also wonder how long it will be until WD releases 500gb platter 1tb drives.

Fred · Post by **Fred** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:11 am

I will most likely get it... But i'm still waiting for a good swedish store to sell it. >_>

Metaluna · Post by **Metaluna** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 7:13 am

ryboto wrote:I am also curious. I also wonder how long it will be until WD releases 500gb platter 1tb drives.

Probably depends on how many of those 2TB drives they're moving at the absurd price premium they're currently charging. If those drives are taking up all their 500gb platter production, it doesn't make sense to use them in the lower margin 1TB drives. I'm surprised that Samsung and Seagate haven't come out with 2TB drives yet, since they both seem to have 500gb platters.

SleepyBum · Post by **SleepyBum** » Sat Apr 04, 2009 6:47 pm

These drives seems to be out in Japan since Jan 31, 2009.

http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/akiba/ho ... msung.html

Just takes a long time to reach the rest of the world. The pricing on the 1.5TB model is excellent.

SleepyBum · Post by **SleepyBum** » Tue May 05, 2009 7:17 pm

Provantage has this HD available now and shows 2990 In Stock at posting time. Price is $86.51, but the $12+ shipping kills it.

http://www.provantage.com/samsung-hd103si~7SAMA03Q.htm

ZipZoomfly has it listed up on their website, but shows out of stock as of now. Price is $91.99 with free ship.

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductDe ... e=10010330

Hopefully, it'll come in stock soon, and someone can post a review of it. I'll probably buy one if it fell another $5-10 in price.

mac79 · Post by **mac79** » Wed May 06, 2009 12:29 am

Hello all
New Samsung's EcoGreen are available at Pixmania Wordwide shops.
e.x. in Poland http://www.pixmania.com/pl/pl/r/ecogreen-samsung
Prices are quite fine: 1PLN=4,3 Euro
so 103SI=95 Euro

I also thinking about Seagate 1TB Pipeline HD ST31000533CS.
It got a huge discount now:
In Poland we can get it for 80Euro !
While WD GP 1TB is for 100Euro.

cheers

shady · Post by **shady** » Thu May 07, 2009 8:24 am

Hi,

I just have this drive to replace my Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB. I would say this drive is very quite and cool. Idle temp is 10C lower than my Barracuda. Performance wise, its much faster than my Seagate with read/write speeds around 90MB/s mark and access time of 16ms. It's little slower than my Spinpoint F1 but for a storage drive, I would recommend this drive. In Japan, I bought this drive for around 7000yen. Around U$70.

Moon GT · Post by **Moon GT** » Thu May 07, 2009 11:25 am

I just installed a 500Gb one. Far bigger than I need really, but it was for the silence, obviously. It's considerably quieter than the 250Gb Hitachi P7K500 it replaced, which was, to be honest, something of a disappointment.

It makes some unusual clicking sounds (like seek noise) when turning on, and when you start a SMART self test it makes a whirring sound for a short while. I don't know what any of that means. Tests all passed though, so we'll see how it goes.

I got it from Tekheads.co.uk for just under Â£40.

Ksanderash · Post by **Ksanderash** » Fri May 08, 2009 7:39 am

Moon GT
Does it park his heads in idle mode (not sleep)? Do you notice sometimes a singular sharp clacking sound through the usual ambient noise?

If your entire computer is enough quiet, of course.

whiic · Post by **whiic** » Fri May 08, 2009 4:02 pm

I have a 1TB F2 Ecogreen.

I haven't head anything resembling an unload sound. If I had heard, I would be worried, as Samsung doesn't use unload technology in 3.5" HDDs (in 2.5", every manufacturer uses, even Samsung and Seagate). Only Hitachi (all HDDs since 75GXP) and WD (GreenPower) use.

Lack of unload technology is apparent from idle power consumption readings. 4-platter WD uses 3.8 watts (StorageReview), 3-platter uses 2.8 watts (WD's claim). Samsung F2 5400rpm needs 5.5 watts, dunno if it's 2-platter 1TB or 3-platter 1.5TB... but anyway, it's quite obvious which is more economical.

But Ecogreen can be quieter.
- It doesn't make unload clicks.
- It makes less noise. (Due to less platters but possibly also because of Samsung's low-noise know-how.)
- It's noise character is nicer. (My WDs spindle motor makes slight buzzing noise. Reading from the drive makes even louder buzzing. My F2 does not buzz. Ever.)

STR of my 5400rpm F2 is identical to my 7200rpm F1. Access times are increased only by the amount of increased latency, meaning seek speeds are identical (and also seek noise is as loud as with 7200rpm Samsungs). AAM is not nearly as efficient as WDs, only increasing access time a few milliseconds when enabled.

15 -> 17...18ms.
15 -> 22ms. And WD also has the IntelliSeek. It's quieter than Samsung at 15ms performance mode. In AAM enabled difference is just bigger.

I just hope my F2 EG doesn't start to crap out. I've had problems with uncorrectable (bad) sector count before and they can be quite nasty. and behave in odd ways. One day it may be ok, second day system may be bluescreening, offline data collection may end up aborted due to fatal fault and SMART self-test may give damaged head status... all if there's even one uncorrectable sector. But the next day, the uncorrectable may have disappeared, no reallocation, and SMART failure status is replaced by passing with flying colors. This just happened with my F1.

F2 hasn't (so far) behaved in such way. Has lots of slow sectors though but modern drives tend to have more of them. I remember the sub-100GB/platter era. I was worried about some ~100ms delays on my Hitachis, 3 and 7 slow sectors. Now, my 1TB drives have hundreds and hundreds of them. It's all about maximizing yield while pushing technology to the edge. They use all shorts of stuff like adaptive formatting nowadays.

Ksanderash · Post by **Ksanderash** » Sun May 10, 2009 11:32 pm

whiic
Tnanks for sharing your experience. About a few years ago Samsung was a breath of fresh air among other hdd-market players. That's after the very beginning, when buying a hard-disk labeled "Samsung" was an insane bravery. And starting the 160-250Gb phase production they become lousy again. I switched back to Hitachi quickly on that day. Maybe it's time to give it a chance again... We don't have F2 Ecogreen here yet, but I'll check it by all means when it appears.

...

Oops, I see 500Gb version available

That's even overkill for me.

mac79 · Post by **mac79** » Sat Jun 06, 2009 11:34 pm

I wasn't able to hear it yet... maybe during the night

KadazanPL · Post by **KadazanPL** » Sun Jun 07, 2009 3:35 am

I recently bought one of those drives - HD103SI - and I am very pleased with it. It is very quiet, it rests on the bottom of the case for the time being and even though there is no insulation nor dampening, it is virtually silent. Its idle noise and seeks are easily drowned by nearby WD2000JS (suspended), which is nearing its retirement after 4 years of intense operation.

I will get back later with some tests. I always encrypt my drives with Truecrypt, so I will be able to post speed comparison between clean and an encrypted drive. For the time being, I can only say that the new Samsung is fast and responsive, reaching about 84MB/s average transfer rate in HDtach with only 5400RPM, in contrast to WD2000JS's 50MB/s. The latter is 7200RPM

Onecar · Post by **Onecar** » Mon Jun 08, 2009 11:08 am

Hello,

today I bought one of the "famous" EcoGreen F2 HD103SI hard drives and I am not pleased at all. In the beginning it looked very well: extremely silent (I did not even recognize that I have one hard drive more in my case), no vibrations and simply very silent.

After doing some necessary activity (I mean formatting) first of all I tried the Error Scan feature in my favourite HD Tune 2.55. See what I got:

Code: Select all

jednoauto. com/terabajt-samsung.png

13 damaged blocks, that's about 5 gigabytes of all the space. Well, Quick Scan might be wrong, so I tried WD Lifeguard Diagnostics. Guess what?

Code: Select all

jednoauto. com/wd-lifeguard-diagnostics-samsung-hd103si.png

Yes gentlemen, my HD103SI was not even able to finish the test! (some read error occured). Tomorrow I'm gonna try RMA

.

// From some stupid reason I can't send URLs unless I write at least 3 posts before, so that's what I've used the CODE buttons instead.

tksh · Post by **tksh** » Mon Jun 08, 2009 12:28 pm

Good luck on your RMA process. I just went through the RMA process for a HD103UI purchased back in November and have been sent a HD103UJ instead. They're unwilling to budge on it and have insisted the UJ model is the replacement for the UI model here in Canada.

My problem was that the HD103UI would freeze the system during high IO activity. I do have a WD GreenPower from the same period and it has been fine for me so far so take that for what it's worth.

SleepyBum · Post by **SleepyBum** » Fri Jun 19, 2009 3:12 pm

I just got my HD103SI from newegg today. First surprise was it's made in China by SAE Magnetics LTD / China, production date 2009.06. All my other Samsung HDs were made in Korea. I hope this doesn't reduce the reliability/quietness. Need to format it and test it out.

My experience is about same as Moon GT's. This drive makes a weird seek/click sounds when it starts up for about 5 seconds. After that it's pretty much silent. No vibrations or high pitched whine at all.

It does make a very slight clunk-clunk-clunk seeking sound every few seconds when doing a file copy, but you have to stick your ears right up next to it to hear it. Can't hear it about 2 feet away.

Seems to be a nice drive. No head parking/offloading click sounds like the WD green (own 3 of those), so that's a plus. Hope they'll stock the 1.5TB ones soon.

Shamgar · Post by **Shamgar** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 9:00 am

SleepyBum wrote:I just got my HD103SI from newegg today. First surprise was it's made in China by SAE Magnetics LTD / China, production date 2009.06. All my other Samsung HDs were made in Korea. I hope this doesn't reduce the reliability/quietness. Need to format it and test it out.

I was after a storage/backup drive to save files from my system drive so I can format it and start over. The F2 EcoGreen series is not only good quality but also very good value. I like Samsung as a brand for hard drives. I just picked up an HD103SI/Y -- Product of China, manufactured very recently.

I told myself I would never get a drive larger than 500GB yet I have ended up with two of them so far: a WD6400AAKS and now the HD103SI/Y. Funny how that works out. I bought both of them for AUD$89. Very competitive prices; bargains actually, considering our weaker currency. I wanted to get the HD502HI which sells locally for 66-75 but for $20 or so more I got double the storage capacity -- at perhaps a minute cost of noise and power. Insignificant really. I have partitioned and formatted it to the equal of a 500G drive (~465GB) and left the rest unallocated. So I can kind of pretend it's "only" a 500GB drive. For now.

<off topic, a little>
As for being made in China, I wouldn't worry about that too much. Though it is uncommon to come across a Samsung drive that's not made in its home country of Korea. Due to demands and specificities of regional markets, they may have had to outsource some production. It's still better than WD, who outsource to several places at once and change specifications without notice and sell it under the same guise. (Not forgetting also, their "Intelli"power.) Not implying that Samsung or others don't do this at all, though perhaps less blatantly.

Consider that most of the other components in your computer originate from China and Taiwan (and have been for years), it's not a major cause for concern. Most technology production will probably be moved to China anyway, if it hasn't already. And do not be surprised if China takes up large holdings or even full ownership of the majority of industrial and technology companies one day.
</off topic, finished>

I read so much Samsung fear about its reliability that I just decided to ignore it and go ahead with my purchases. They make cool, quiet and low power drives for a great price. I will test this F2 EcoGreen out in my newer PC (on my old one now--it doesn't like new HDDs) and see how things go. Hopefully no bad sectors and performance will be more than capable for storage.

Grossmeister · Post by **Grossmeister** » Sat Nov 14, 2009 1:47 pm

Hello.
I wonder what is the noise difference between HD103SI and HD502HI.
There is an article from THG, but there is a mistake on sound level measuremnts diagrams.
Idle:
EcoGreen F1 1000GB - 42.2 dB
EcoGreen F2 1000GB - 44.7 dB
"Database-Type":
EcoGreen F2 1000GB - 42.6 dB
EcoGreen F1 1000GB - 46.4 dB.
The main question (for my ears) is vibration sound, I don't care so much about seek clicks. Do HD103SI and HD502HI have similar vibration level?

Shamgar · Post by **Shamgar** » Sun Nov 15, 2009 7:20 am

Grossmeister wrote:The main question (for my ears) is vibration sound, I don't care so much about seek clicks. Do HD103SI and HD502HI have similar vibration level?

Hello. I would think vibration would be similar, but better in favour of 1 platter HD502HI. 2 platter HD103SI vibration level is quite good already, meaning not much vibration.

You will have to consider between the benefit of larger capacity for a slight increase in noise for the 1TB or a slightly quieter drive with lesser capacity for the 500GB. Choose which is most important to you. Seeks and strange warmup routine can be quiet audible for these F2s but once in idle, they are barely noticeable.