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

EarlZ · Post by **EarlZ** » Thu Oct 01, 2009 4:51 pm

Did samsung ever get to fix the cold boot problem with this drive, the F1 was plagued with that problem on certain chipsets/mobo

Michael Sandstrom · Post by **Michael Sandstrom** » Fri Oct 02, 2009 2:41 am

Sweatypickle, you have the patience of Job. You must be a saint.

aztec · Post by **aztec** » Tue Oct 13, 2009 3:52 pm

I'm finally moving to SSD for my OS drive and wanted to get a secondary HD.

Have decided on a 1TB Samsung.

Question now is F2 or F3?

The F3 seems blazingly fast and relatively quiet.

Anyone have had a chance to compare between the 1TB F3 and 1TB Ecogreen?

Thanks!

mattyc · Post by **mattyc** » Sat Oct 17, 2009 11:44 pm

I have just upgraded to this drive, it is much quiter than my previous WD drive.
It took me ages to get into the Samsung utility running from a cd but when i changed my Motherboard settings to IDE from AHCI, the tool booted straight away.

Anyway after all that, i changed AAM settings to fast, rebooted and havent noticed any noise difference but no performance benefits either, even using hd tach and hd sentinel to check drive speed.

mkk · Post by **mkk** » Mon Oct 19, 2009 2:41 pm

Before finally getting one HD103SJ for my own system I started up a couple of 1TB F1's and F3's and made a totally unscentific feel and listen test. (I'm part timing in a shop.) The F3's vibrated just a little bit less than the F1's with no discernable sample variance. The room was far from silent so all I could say after putting my ear to them is they appeared pretty much the same when it came to idle noise; fairly low and unproblematic in most non-mesh cases placed under a desk.

Only being hooked up to power there were no seek noises to listen for, except for the F3's making a peculiar, strong shifting of heads when powered up the first time. Not something that I've heard again afterwards, so I reckon it was a quick calibration. Inside my system where there are no 1TB F1's but two 640GB F1's(I've stuck with two-platter drives for ages) the seeks from the 1TB F3 seems about the same or slightly higher, but variances in position may well foul that comparison.

AAM was off by default on this disk and I haven't tried changing it with the required latest version of ES-Tool. It's off on all of my six drives anyway. I'll be getting at least a second one of these. My SSD adventure can wait.
Edit: strangely, ES-Tool 3.00g couldn't find this drive now that I just tested. 2.11 finds it but says AAM is not supported.
Edit2: Why not a HD Tach shot for good measure:

aztec · Post by **aztec** » Tue Oct 20, 2009 2:48 pm

Just got my HD103SJ and mounted it on a NoVibes III.

This thing is quiet! Will definitely use as a secondary once I get my SSD.

Will report some benches later.

kiwik · Post by **kiwik** » Wed Oct 21, 2009 9:03 am

The amount of positive feedback in this topic has convinced me to get a HD103SJ in the next couple of weeks.

mkk · Post by **mkk** » Fri Oct 23, 2009 4:06 pm

A note on practical performance improvements. Starting a level in the game Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is consistently a whole 50% faster on this HD103SJ than on either of my two HD642JJ(640GB F1's). It's quite noticeable while you're watching this games excellent mission intros. Now I really have to get another and make that one a system drive.

Footnote: In practice I would notice less of this difference running Vista than Windows 7 as I am now, since Superfetch has been cut down a lot. Previously I could often start the latest level in a few seconds shortly after a reboot. But it's not a big enough reason to go back.

veseliburek · Post by **veseliburek** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 3:27 am

What about noise compared to F1 series? I'm planning on getting one of theese but mu Samsung 753LJ F1 is very noisy...

mkk · Post by **mkk** » Sun Oct 25, 2009 4:41 am

veseliburek wrote:What about noise compared to F1 series? I'm planning on getting one of theese but mu Samsung 753LJ F1 is very noisy...

What kind of noise? There's vibration that is often amplified by the metal structure of a case unless dampened well. Idle noise - a high pitched whine coming from the motor and spinning discs, a type of noise that usually requires foam dampening and is harder to avoid in cases with an open mesh side or front. And lastly there's seek noise from when drive heads move about quickly, where vibration dampening/amplification also applies to some degree.

See my first post a bit further up on this page for a quick comparison. (750GB F1 has the same basic build as the 1TB F1's)

rhys j · Post by **rhys j** » Fri Oct 30, 2009 12:51 pm

ES-tool worked fine for me. Burnt the iso onto a CD, changed the BIOS to boot from CD, put the CD in and restarted the computer, selected the right drive by typing "m:" in dos, "dir" to list the files, then "estool.exe" to run it, and it worked.

Tried changing the AAM mode to from Disabled to Quiet to Fast; ran the test twice in each mode. Here are the results:

Disable (default):

Quiet:

Fast:

In other words this doesn't seem to have any effect whatsoever. I didn't notice any difference acoustically either, so maybe the estool.exe program isn't compatible with this drive.

geobrick · Post by **geobrick** » Sat Dec 05, 2009 6:29 pm

1 out of the 4 of my Samsung F3 HD502HJ's drives has failed within 3 weeks.

I bought 4 Samsung F3 HD502HJ's in September in preparation for a new build. In Nov I installed them in a RAID 10 (with the built in MB ICH10R controller) for data (RAID was not for the OS - Win7). After about 3 weeks, I had a freeze-up (there was no blue screen).

When I rebooted, the RAID controller reported a problem in one of the drives. I took it out of the RAID and ran ESTOOLS on it (floppy boot b/c the CD boot version wouldn't run on my system).

ESTOOLS found errors and suggested using HD Erase (or something like that). I did that and then ran a low level format. More Errors/defects were found. After that, I filled out the RMA info on Samsung's site and sent the drive back to Samsung for replacement.

I've been using Samsung drives for years. I was always impressed with how quiet they are. Other brands have only recently been making drives that rival Samsung when in comes to noise levels.

This was my first failure with a samsung. I have several that are years old and are still running fine.

I hope this is not a trend because I plan to buy a new drive to replace it. I'm pretty sure the replacement drive Samsung will send me will be a refurb. I'll use the new one in the RAID and save the replacement as a spare when it eventually arrives. Right now the RAID is running with the 3 other drives plus an older 501LJ (not optimal but it's working fine).

Any other reports of F3 HD502HJ failures?

geobrick · Post by **geobrick** » Mon Dec 21, 2009 1:12 am

Otter wrote:While poking around the internet, I discovered that Samsung doesn't have a utility to enable CCTL (similar to Seagate's ERC and WD's TLER) on the F1 series. Either the drive has it, because you paid up to get the "RAID class" model, or it doesn't. This makes me wonder if these new F3 drives will tend to get dropped from RAID arrays because they spend too long trying to correct errors. I'm not convinced that any manufacturer's enterprise or "raid" drives are physically different than the regular drives. But the firmware might be an issue. OTOH, some say error recovery timeouts are only an issue for WD drives.

If you used non-raid F1's or F3's in a RAID 1, 10, 5, or 6 array, please tell me how how long you've been at it and whether or not you've had any problems. Because there is no redundancy, I don't think taking time for error recovery would be an issue with RAID 0.

I've been playing with a program called HDAT2.exe and it seems to have the ability to set the CCTL on a Samsung drive but I'm not sure how to confirm it outside of that software. You can get it here: http://www.hdat2.com Report your results back here and let us know if it works. My initial attempt seemed to allow me to change the CCTL read setting from '0' (disabled) to 7 seconds.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:36 pm

Tzeb wrote: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.

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.

HD Sentinel does wonders with SMART. It reads many RAID controllers, for example it's the only program capable of reading SMART from my 3ware controller.

zsero · Post by **zsero** » Mon Jan 04, 2010 1:49 pm

Which drive would you suggest for a file server in RAID 1? I have been using Seagate 7200.12s, and they almost died under a year, so I am looking for other brands now.

I have had just good experience with Samsung, and no experience with WD. What drive should I buy, F3 1TB or Black 1 TB? I am afraid of Black because on the newer ones wdtler.exe does not work, so I might go with Samsung, which never had RAID issues (as I know). Is there anybody using Samsung drives with a real RAID controller?

Wibla · Post by **Wibla** » Tue Jan 05, 2010 8:07 am

post i quoted underneath

jimmyzaas wrote:In my case it was 100% failure with Samsung. First with the 750GB model, Second with the 1TB model. The thing about Samsung is there is no advanced RMA, so you have to buy a new one just to recover your data to. The 750GB failure prompted the purchase of the 1TB model. The 1TB failure prompted the purchase of the WD 1TB Black.

Considering they were cooled by 2x92mm fans in a solo with direct airflow to them, it shows really poor reliability.

This is the reason why my Samsungs are now used for things I don't care much about and all my important stuff goes on WD Blacks. They are louder and vibrate more, but it's been around the same amount of time and neither one has failed. Noise is important but I value my data alot more.

These F3 drives look stunning but I need alot more reassurance before I get another Sammy

No, you got shafted by bad luck twice, it happens. To talk about "poor reliability" you need to look at large datasets, preferably hundreds of drives over a timeframe of years.
I have a dataset of around 70-80 F1 drives, and during the last two years I've seen very few failures, nothing I'd call conclusive, but its a good indication that the drives are fairly solid overall.
Where did the drives come from BTW? newegg? In that case you can probably blame shipping damage, their harddrive packaging is horrible.

zsero wrote:Which drive would you suggest for a file server in RAID 1? I have been using Seagate 7200.12s, and they almost died under a year, so I am looking for other brands now.

I have had just good experience with Samsung, and no experience with WD. What drive should I buy, F3 1TB or Black 1 TB? I am afraid of Black because on the newer ones wdtler.exe does not work, so I might go with Samsung, which never had RAID issues (as I know). Is there anybody using Samsung drives with a real RAID controller?

Samsung F2 1.5TB is not suitable for RAID, their firmware will barf all over you and it will get messy. F1, F2 1TB or F3 is good, and I have a suspicion that since the new 2TB F3 is actually a F3 EG, not F2 it might have a decent firmware to boot, so it works well with raid.

I bought 16 1.5TB Seagate LP drives this fall, 1600 hours runtime so far with no problems. I wouldnt hesitate to recommend Samsung F1/F3 for server usage tho, the LP's just was the best value for me at the time (and has a proven track record in swraid configurations, according to BackBlaze).

And slightly less off topic: I RMA'ed two Samsung T166 drives and will be getting F3 500GB drives back, YAY

Looking forward to testing these, considering replacing the F1 640GB in my WS with one, and maybe putting the other one in my HTPC / lan PC

(That brings the total number of failed samsung drives up to 3, one 300GB and two T166 500GB drives, out of 14 F1 drives, 11 T166 drives and one 300/320GB, 26 samsung drives total)

silex1 · Post by **silex1** » Tue Jan 12, 2010 6:47 am

Hello people !

I have some questions regarding the new F3 series from Samsung and maybe a few owners can answer me.
I have (need/must) to buy a new drive because I'm running out of space on the 640gb raid 0 partition made of 2 Seagate 7200.10 sata drives( both will be sold after I buy the new one). I have suspended them on elastics and, for now, I'm very pleased that I can only hear the fan of the PSU - Corsair tx650. I'm speaking about idle noise (I'm not worried at all about seek noise and I can live with it).
So, with the PSU fan (600rpm 12cm) beeing the most loudest component in the system, I'm worried that my new Hard drive would be very annoying.
I'm referring at the motor humming-buzzing sound that can be noted when the drive is idle and on a table, not fixed in a case.
I know that I'm very subjective and it's because of the 2.5 years of silent pc with suspended 7200.10 and no lateral window (as a side note - the 7200.10's are definitely more quiter at idle than the WD 320 Caviar Blue).
How are the new 1TB Samsung F3 in this respect ? The idle noise is audible in a silent room / pc at night ? Or how about the Seagate 7200.12 1TB drives, are any quieter than the F3 at idle (I'm not willing to sacrifice the speed a 7200 drive gives

) ?

Thanx in advance !

Viktorjoh · Post by **Viktorjoh** » Fri Jan 29, 2010 3:41 pm

I'm also wondering about the difference in noise level between the F1 and the F3 (1TB models). Since the F1 has been reviewed in depth and is recommended on the site, the successor's acoustic performance is of high interest. A basic, subjective back-to-back comparison might suffice, just perhaps in a slightly more ideal environment than in mkk's case. If one favors silence over speed, is it wise to play it safe and go with the F1 or does the F3 perform just as well in this aspect?

NT · Post by NT » Tue Feb 09, 2010 6:57 am

geobrick wrote:
Otter wrote:While poking around the internet, I discovered that Samsung doesn't have a utility to enable CCTL (similar to Seagate's ERC and WD's TLER) on the F1 series. Either the drive has it, because you paid up to get the "RAID class" model, or it doesn't. This makes me wonder if these new F3 drives will tend to get dropped from RAID arrays because they spend too long trying to correct errors. I'm not convinced that any manufacturer's enterprise or "raid" drives are physically different than the regular drives. But the firmware might be an issue. OTOH, some say error recovery timeouts are only an issue for WD drives.

If you used non-raid F1's or F3's in a RAID 1, 10, 5, or 6 array, please tell me how how long you've been at it and whether or not you've had any problems. Because there is no redundancy, I don't think taking time for error recovery would be an issue with RAID 0.
I've been playing with a program called HDAT2.exe and it seems to have the ability to set the CCTL on a Samsung drive but I'm not sure how to confirm it outside of that software. You can get it here: http://www.hdat2.com Report your results back here and let us know if it works. My initial attempt seemed to allow me to change the CCTL read setting from '0' (disabled) to 7 seconds.

how did this go for you guys, was it ever proven that it works properly?

thanks!

geobrick · Post by **geobrick** » Tue Feb 09, 2010 11:51 pm

NT wrote: how did this go for you guys, was it ever proven that it works properly?

thanks!

I discovered that the setting can be changed by HDAT2 but it doesn't change permanitly. The setting goes back to the default after you remove power. So it's not a solution. for changing the default CCTL setting.

But I think, after reading some details of the SMART protocol and CCTL setting, a proper controller should be able set the drives automatically to work with the RAID controller through the SMART protocal whether the drive is RAID class or not. A RAID class drive may have a default CCTL setting of 7 but theres no reason any controller can't set any hard drive to that value (or any value the controller requires) at start up.

The fix for my drives drives dropping out of RAIDs was to use the latest (I think still Beta) version of Intel's Rapid Storage Technology. It replaces the Intel Matrix Storage Technology. I found Version 9.5.4.1001 on the web but others have has success with an earlier release.

Read this: http://communities.intel.com/thread/930 ... hread=true

and this

http://hdat2.getphpbb.com/hdat2-common- ... -t201.html

NT · Post by NT » Wed Feb 10, 2010 7:07 am

Intriguing, so the (comparatively limited) controller built into recent Intel chipsets can fix this in concert with recent drivers?

Are those drivers also available for GNU/Linux or only Windows?
I wonder if one can get away with using the appropriate dvr + softRAID, such as MDADM etc?

If you're not sure I will investigate further, thank-you!

kaotikfunk · Post by **kaotikfunk** » Fri Feb 12, 2010 1:23 pm

geobrick wrote:1 out of the 4 of my Samsung F3 HD502HJ's drives has failed within 3 weeks.

I bought 4 Samsung F3 HD502HJ's in September in preparation for a new build. In Nov I installed them in a RAID 10 (with the built in MB ICH10R controller) for data (RAID was not for the OS - Win7). After about 3 weeks, I had a freeze-up (there was no blue screen).

When I rebooted, the RAID controller reported a problem in one of the drives. I took it out of the RAID and ran ESTOOLS on it (floppy boot b/c the CD boot version wouldn't run on my system).

ESTOOLS found errors and suggested using HD Erase (or something like that). I did that and then ran a low level format. More Errors/defects were found. After that, I filled out the RMA info on Samsung's site and sent the drive back to Samsung for replacement.

I've been using Samsung drives for years. I was always impressed with how quiet they are. Other brands have only recently been making drives that rival Samsung when in comes to noise levels.

This was my first failure with a samsung. I have several that are years old and are still running fine.

I hope this is not a trend because I plan to buy a new drive to replace it. I'm pretty sure the replacement drive Samsung will send me will be a refurb. I'll use the new one in the RAID and save the replacement as a spare when it eventually arrives. Right now the RAID is running with the 3 other drives plus an older 501LJ (not optimal but it's working fine).

Any other reports of F3 HD502HJ failures?

How have your other drives been? I was about to buy an F3, and Newegg, Amazon, and ZipZoomFly all de-listed them or changed the status to out of stock this week. Is it high demand, or something else?

NT · Post by NT » Fri Feb 12, 2010 8:14 pm

NT wrote:Intriguing, so the (comparatively limited) controller built into recent Intel chipsets can fix this in concert with recent drivers?

Are those drivers also available for GNU/Linux or only Windows?
I wonder if one can get away with using the appropriate dvr + softRAID, such as MDADM etc?

If you're not sure I will investigate further, thank-you!

Geobrick did you see this? Thank-you.

geobrick · Post by **geobrick** » Fri Feb 12, 2010 10:27 pm

NT wrote:
NT wrote:Intriguing, so the (comparatively limited) controller built into recent Intel chipsets can fix this in concert with recent drivers?

Are those drivers also available for GNU/Linux or only Windows?
I wonder if one can get away with using the appropriate dvr + softRAID, such as MDADM etc?

If you're not sure I will investigate further, thank-you!
Geobrick did you see this? Thank-you.

Intel usually has drivers for other OSs so I'm sure there is a Linux version. I only know of the problem with the Matrix Storage Technology drivers with Windows 7. Also, I'm not familiar with softRAIDs.

NT · Post by NT » Fri Feb 12, 2010 10:31 pm

okay thanks

geobrick · Post by **geobrick** » Fri Feb 12, 2010 10:36 pm

kaotikfunk wrote: How have your other drives been? I was about to buy an F3, and Newegg, Amazon, and ZipZoomFly all de-listed them or changed the status to out of stock this week. Is it high demand, or something else?

I have not had a failure yet. It's possible the first failure was caused by the Intel RAID driver (Matrix Storage Technology).

When the drive dropped out of RAID (Twice), I assumed it was bad.
It may have actually been bad since Samsung's ESTOOLS confirmed it was bad. Seems to be a coincidence that I'd have the drive kicked out of the RAID because the controller said the drive was bad (and ESTOOLS confirmed). Yet when the new drive was in the RAID, I continued to have problems with the RAID set up (other drives kicked out of the RAID).

I've had no problems since I installed the Rapid Storage Technology drivers in DEC 2009.

HFat · Post by **HFat** » Sun Feb 14, 2010 12:14 pm

Sorry if I missed the answer in this long thread but... does anyone know how the power consumption of the F3 compares to the F2?

kaotikfunk · Post by **kaotikfunk** » Sun Feb 14, 2010 1:46 pm

HFat wrote:Sorry if I missed the answer in this long thread but... does anyone know how the power consumption of the F3 compares to the F2?

Tom's has some results posted for the 500Gb version:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/2tb ... 30-10.html

4.1w idle, 6.8w streaming reads, 5.7w workstation IO benchmark

I think the chart is very misleading, however. It's not comparing equal drive sizes. The F3 reviewed was the 500Gb version, which is single platter. The other drives were 2-5 platters, which will require more power to spin the extra mass.

I'm quite excited about the 5.7w workstation IO since I am looking for a relatively quick drive to hold virtual machines. Lots of random IO, not much idle time. The issue for me is that there are rumors that the F3 has a high failure rate

HFat · Post by **HFat** » Sun Feb 14, 2010 2:28 pm

SPCR had the 500G F2 at 3.2W idle but I'm afraid we'd compare apples and oranges by pitting SPCR's numbers against Tom's.

_MarcoM_ · Post by **_MarcoM_** » Mon Feb 15, 2010 11:42 am

kaotikfunk wrote: The issue for me is that there are rumors that the F3 has a high failure rate

Opps, just ordered a Samsung 500GB F3EG

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

My HD103SJ F3 1TB experience

One of Four failed

Re: CCTL

Samsung F3 noise

Re: CCTL

Re: CCTL

Re: One of Four failed

Re: One of Four failed