Samsung F3 series - 500GB per platter - 7200RPM - 500GB/1TB

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Sat Sep 05, 2009 4:51 pm

Hi,

I have 2 of the 500GB F3 drives on the way -- they should arrive Tuesday. One is for my iMac -- the 320GB Western Digital failed ;-( The other will be for an external backup drive.

Last week I bought a 2TB 5900RPM Seagate (for $180!) and I have used it in an external case, and it is pretty quiet: it "wooshes" when it is close to your ear, and seeks are fairly muted. The external case I have is pretty open:

Image

I'll report back on the F3 drives when I have them...

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Post by RaptorX » Sun Sep 06, 2009 9:50 am

Does anybody have the F3 1TB version (HD103SJ) ?

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:47 pm

Hi y'all,

I received the two Samsung F3 500GB hard drives today, and I installed one in my 24" iMac, and the other in the same Macally external case I posted above.

They are reasonably quiet: idle noise is "thin" hissing sounding (something less broadband than a whoosh) and slightly louder than some drives; but it is not a whine. It is not noticeable once it is mounted inside my iMac (which has rubber grommet suspension). It is noticeable from say 12"-16" away when it is running in the (very open aluminum) Macally external case.

Seeks are slightly louder than the Western Digital 320GB that was in the iMac. They are quite muted and not sharp sounding. As far as I can tell both drives are very low vibration.

swivelguy2
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Post by swivelguy2 » Tue Sep 08, 2009 7:52 pm

Isn't a higher platter density supposed to get you not only higher throughput but also shorter seeks? (these are just random google results, from different sources)

Image

Image

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Post by lobuni » Wed Sep 09, 2009 1:34 am

swivelguy2 wrote:Isn't a higher platter density supposed to get you not only higher throughput but also shorter seeks? (these are just random google results, from different sources)
The platter size remains the same. So the head has to move the same distance to use the whole platter. With the increase of density the tracks get smaller and it is more difficult to position the head precisely over the track. Short stroking higher density platter drives might give you better seeks.

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Wed Sep 09, 2009 8:16 am

Hi,

Right, higher areal density only helps the rate of data flow, and it might actually slow down average seek time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

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Post by RaptorX » Wed Sep 09, 2009 2:27 pm

That Samsung HD103SJ looks awsome!!! I want one!!!!

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Sep 11, 2009 11:39 am

Hi,

One of the two Samsung F3 500GB that I own has a bit of vibration, and the other one is very smooth. It happens that the one I put in the Macally external case (above) has a bit of vibration that is only noticeable when the case is standing on its edge (as shown in the picture).

The vibration is noticeable in the wooden table top where it is sitting. Luckily, we want to have it lay on it's side, so I cut the soft plastic feet in half and put the four pieces on the corners. When it is laying on its side, the vibration is moving parallel with the table and you cannot feel it.
Last edited by NeilBlanchard on Tue Sep 15, 2009 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by Koolpc » Sat Sep 12, 2009 2:04 pm

I bought a 500g F2 and boy is it quiet!! I know it is 5400rpm but you would never know it. Runs fast and silent.

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Post by JVM » Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:05 am

Any further news on how quiet is the Samsung SATA F3 500GB drive?

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Tue Sep 15, 2009 1:11 pm

Hi,

Nothing further -- idle noise is very quiet, and the seek noise is muted but a little bit louder than the Western Digital 320GB unit that it replaces. I notice it occasionally, but most of the time it is inaudible inside my 24" iMac.

I'll listen again to the unit that is in the external enclosure -- it is at my in-laws house.

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Post by JVM » Tue Sep 15, 2009 1:17 pm

Neil.

Would you say the F3 is faster than the WD 320GB unit? Is that WD drive a single platter? And which model is that WD you compare to the F3?

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Post by QuietOC » Fri Sep 18, 2009 6:16 pm

JVM wrote:Would you say the F3 is faster than the WD 320GB unit? Is that WD drive a single platter? And which model is that WD you compare to the F3?
If it is the same one that is in my iMac it is a 320GB single platter with 8MB of cache WD3200JS. My 500GB F3 is faster than my WD6400AAKS, not to mention the low end iMac drive.

FWIW: I am currently transferring songs from the WD6400AAKS to the F3 and getting 80MB/s sustained transfer.

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Post by JVM » Fri Sep 18, 2009 8:45 pm

QuietOC wrote:
JVM wrote:Would you say the F3 is faster than the WD 320GB unit? Is that WD drive a single platter? And which model is that WD you compare to the F3?
If it is the same one that is in my iMac it is a 320GB single platter with 8MB of cache WD3200JS. My 500GB F3 is faster than my WD6400AAKS, not to mention the low end iMac drive.

FWIW: I am currently transferring songs from the WD6400AAKS to the F3 and getting 80MB/s sustained transfer.
Sounds good, very good! Any comment on its quietness? Do you think doing a RAID 0 to get more speed makes any sense?

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Post by NeilBlanchard » Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:35 pm

Hi,

I would not use RAID 0 -- it is almost bound to fail, and the speed gain is practically nil.

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Post by JVM » Sat Sep 19, 2009 12:46 pm

NeilBlanchard wrote:Hi,

I would not use RAID 0 -- it is almost bound to fail, and the speed gain is practically nil.
If using RAID 0, I would backup regularly onto a third F3 with Acronis, so failure of a disk is not disastrous. As for speed gain, that seems to be very subjective. I have read where it speeds up boot time considerably, even web-browsing, accessing files, and other things. But, I am interested to know why you say the speed gain is practically nil?

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Post by Tzeb » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:23 pm

In the last 4 years i had 9 samsung hard drives.

- 2xSP2504C RAID 0 - used ~16.000 hours, then i upgraded to
- 2xHD501LJ RAID 0 - used ~2.500 hours
- then quickly upgraded to 2xHD642JJ - used for ~6.500 hours

- about a month ago i bought a HD103UJ (too bad i got a super lazy one), as i started selling my old 250 and 500GB drives.

- recently i bought 2xHD502HJ to replace the "old" 2x640, 333/plater drives.

In the system i have always used a pair of the latest drives available from samsung, in raid 0. Old drives that came off the system were thrown in a drawer and used in an external enclosure - X Craft 360 <-- this is simply a smart and beautifull thing. You can pop the drive in and out of it in no time, without reboot, through esata.

I never made back-ups. I just have an old 650 VA APC UPS that keeps the PC out of trouble. Never has a samsung drive failed on me. I had an old 500GB and a 640GB drive with 5 and 1 reallocated sectors, but that's it.

I could never go back to using one drive. You can easily feel the difference in boot time and every day use if you come from a single drive setup.

The latest 500GB drives are obviously the fastest drives i've ever used and i even noticed better boot times, plus better response in general, even compared to the 2x640 drives. Although, one of the 640 drives used was lazy, it had a ~16 ms acces time while the other was at 13.something.

Here are some hdtune screens.

Left to right : the lazy HD103UJ, 2xHD502HJ and in the end - 2xHD642JJ.

Image Image Image

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Post by JVM » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:29 pm

Well, Neil, that post above just about closes the deal for me. :)

Thanks, Tzeb, for a very interesting and informative post.

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Post by Tzeb » Sat Sep 19, 2009 3:57 pm

I'm sorry for not talking at all about what matters most to the users here. :D

Both my HD502HJ acted the same when i recieved and tested them individually. No abnormal vibration and nothing "out of the usual".

I can honestly say that these are the quietest 3.5" + 7200 RPM drives i have ever met! All my past samsung drives were 2 and 3 platters.

The HD502HJ with one platter is much lighter than any other drive i have. I guess this helps with noise, vibration and temperature. I keep the drives sitting on acoustipack deluxe on the bottom of the case with zero airflow. I remember opening the case to check the old 640GB drives (with raid you can't read temps with any program) and i could not keep the skin on them for more than a few seconds (especially the sides).

The new HD502HJ drives are kept exactly in the same place but they are barely above skin temperature. You could keep your hand on them all day! 8)

HD502HJ is the drive of the moment i think. No point in buying a 333/platter drive when this drive is superfast, light, silent, cold. And when you pair 2 of them in raid 0, who needs SSD?! :twisted:

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Post by JVM » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:13 pm

Thanks again, Tzeb, for adding more information. I am surprised you can't read the temperature in RAID 0, didn't know that. Still, it is good to know the drive runs cool. I have one suspended in my Antec P150 and it reads around 30C. I have two front fans, Nexus 92mm at around 700 rpm blowing on the 3 drives installed. At this time, I am not using the Samsung, just keeping it ready for Windows 7 installation. I have another Samsung F3 sitting in its plastic case waiting for Windows 7 and RAID 0. Considering how inexpensive this drive is, I am going to buy a third F3 to use for making back-up images of my RAID 0. All three of these F3 Samsung drives will cost me less than $150 dollars!

My only concern is reliability with the F3 Samsung. Speed is important, but data preservation is even more important. I hope it works out with the F3, they seem really nice with Nidec spindle motors. I remember long ago the Nidec motors were very quiet unlike the ones from JVC.

Have you tried SpeedFan to read the temperature?

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Post by Tzeb » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:36 pm

Yeah, unfortunately with raid you must give up S.M.A.R.T readings...
The raid chip on the mobo takes control of the drives and can't communicate SMART data to any program. There is nothing that can read this stuff in windows. Trust me, i've done raid 0 from the 250Gb hard drives era.

I think samsung has some dos tools that can read SMART even under raid, but i'm not 100% sure.

If you want to check smart data from time to time you can boot from other hdd/dvd/usb flash drive/whatever with one of the raid drives unplugged. This way you read the data, calm yourself, check the other drive and plug them both back after. :lol:

Btw, you would need the new 1TB f3 if you want to back up 2x500 in raid 0.

I just have the C partition at 20GB, so it's fast and easy to format/back-up/migrate windows to another hdd/raid. 911GB are left for the second partition, but i don't fell that every single bit here is "vital". If shit happends, it will happend even with a single drive. A little common sense and an UPS and raid 0 is golden. 8)

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Post by JVM » Sat Sep 19, 2009 4:41 pm

No, you don't need 1TB to back-up two 500GB in RAID 0. You can use Acronis True Image and it will compress the RAID 0 1TB to the 500GB drive, and then you can restore to your new RAID 0 array, at least that was what I've been told.

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Post by Tzeb » Sat Sep 19, 2009 5:06 pm

I've used Acronis True Image many times when i moved my C partition to a new raid. While it can compress data, it can't do magic. It also depends on what files you backup. Some files could have a 50% or even higher compression ratio, while others may be at 90 or 98% of their original size. There is a very small chance 931GB will compress to 465GB.

Besides, acronis takes some time making and restoring a backup. You are better off with a 1TB f3 and using copy - paste for evey folder you want safe

Or you can use a third 500GB f3 and go like this : "This ~465GB of data from my 2x500GB raid 0 i care for, the rest... not so much". :twisted:

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Post by JVM » Sat Sep 19, 2009 6:51 pm

There is no way I would be using even 450GB of space on the RAID 0. My first plan was to use just the 500GB F3 as that is plenty for me, but then I got interested in RAID 0 mainly for performance and that's really the only reason I would do it. So, I don't think there would be any problem for Acronis to compress files and restore as needed. Aside from doing periodic images of my RAID 0, I would back-up certain data to a DVD.

How much space have you used on your RAID 0 with 1TB? Quite frankly, I don't understand the way HD market has gone to such enormous capacities while leaving drives less than 320GB in the almost forgotten zone. I truly wonder how much of the market really uses more than 500GB of space on their computer. I would think it must be real fun defragging a drive using over 500GB. :wink:

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Post by Otter » Sun Sep 20, 2009 1:14 am

JVM wrote:No, you don't need 1TB to back-up two 500GB in RAID 0. You can use Acronis True Image and it will compress the RAID 0 1TB to the 500GB drive, and then you can restore to your new RAID 0 array, at least that was what I've been told.
I think what you were told about was not a compressed backup but a parity drive. Acronis may have the ability to read each pair of bits on the raid drives and create a parity drive from that data. If one of the raid drives is lost, Acronis would then use the partiy drive and the surviving drive to recreate the lost drive. The problem with this is that it only works for areas of the raid array that have not changed since the parity drive was created. Thus, you'd not only loose new or updated files, but any files that had been moved or defragmented. I'm not sure how Acronis handles restoring the MFT, which will certainly have changed, or even if it makes parity "backups" in the first place, but this sounds like an extremely dodgy way to backup your data.

The way around these problems is to update the parity drive with each write. This is called RAID 5. But if you wanted RAID 0 for greater write performance, RAID 5 is a giant leap in the wrong direction.
My only concern is reliability with the F3 Samsung. Speed is important, but data preservation is even more important.
Then stay away from RAID 0. If the safety of your data is most important to you, take a small hit in write performance compared to a single drive, and go with RAID 1. Of course, this also cuts your storage space in half. But if you can justify buying three F3's, consider getting one more and going with RAID 10. This would give you both high performance and redundancy. It would be slightly louder than a two drive array, of course, but if you start with quite drives, you could still have a very quite system.

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Post by JVM » Sun Sep 20, 2009 4:03 am

Acronis does compress. I used Acronis to compress my 320GB drive into my 160GB drive--no problem. Acronis even tells you it compresses the back-up.

I will do periodic disk back-ups as full image of my RAID 0 as well as specific data backed up to a DVD. Of course, if one drive in the array fails and I haven't backed up for a week, I will lose what was done in that week. I say a week but I know it would not be longer and perhaps not even a week.

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Post by HFat » Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:04 am

You can use SMART with software RAID.

Avoid RAID0 if you care about your data and don't rely on compression when planning backup media purchases.

EDIT: oops!
Last edited by HFat on Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:35 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Post by JVM » Sun Sep 20, 2009 6:36 am

HFat wrote:You can use SMART with software RAID.

Avoid RAID0 if you care about your data and do rely on compression when planning backup media purchases.
What is so bad about compression? When doing backups with Acronis, it compresses even without RAID. There is an option, I believe, to do backups without compression. There is also in the new version of Acronis, 2010, to backup to Acronis online, although there is a $4.95 a month fee for that.

Aside from doing a full backup of entire RAID array, I am going to backup specific data to a DVD periodically.

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Post by HFat » Sun Sep 20, 2009 8:43 am

Nothing wrong with compression. Just don't count on it unless you know what you're doing or you might end up unable to backup for lack of space.

Don't trust this Acronis thing blindly if you care about your data. It's good practice to try to restore ALL your data in order make sure your backup process and media work as expected.

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Post by JVM » Sun Sep 20, 2009 11:22 am

HFat wrote:Nothing wrong with compression. Just don't count on it unless you know what you're doing or you might end up unable to backup for lack of space.

Don't trust this Acronis thing blindly if you care about your data. It's good practice to try to restore ALL your data in order make sure your backup process and media work as expected.
All the data will be backed up--just not every day. Even when using a single drive, as I do now, I never backed up every day. What I meant above is full backups like once a week and specific data backed-up periodically. I also intend to clone the array upon completion of the OS install.

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