• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

New Samsung F4 2TB, faulty?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the AnandTech community: where nearly half-a-million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Now I'm tempted to get an SSD. Man, by the end of the week I'm going to have spent $300 on hard drives, lol

Besides SSD's being over twice as fast, silent, and cool, what are some more advantages to them? I'll do some research of my own, but I'm most curious about longevity. They advertise them as having a lifespan of 2 million hours, I'm pretty sure it will outlive me, my kids, and my grandkids at that rate =p
 
Last edited:
SSDs also use less energy and are more reliable. They are several hundred times faster in many circumstances due to their incredible access times. They don't need to "spin up" after entering a sleep state.

I'm sure there are more advantages. Basically SSDs are better in every way compared to traditional HDDs, aside from cost per gigabyte.
 
Pros
Your OS will boot up faster.

Cons
once everything is in RAM the SSD doesn't come into play nor a mechanical drive

Your OS is on the SSD because you might reboot 20 times a day and need it to boot up in 5 seconds. Not faster game loads since 13 games avg 7GB plus all applications plus all data.. Cant do it, size is limitation. You want a Intel sandbag you get 250GB for 600 dollars. realy smart there,

Better upgrade is RAM any day of the week,, especially going from 2GB to 4GB and so on.
 
Sure my friend. BTW you have to format it with 512k bytes per cluster instead of 4KB. Its the specs of the drive that its 512 bytes. I did it with Partition Wizard. Here are the screenies. Oh shoot,,, I dont have those options and tabs like that,, hmmmm my hd tune is simpler smaller , I think cuz its free version, but here are three tests for you 2 of mine and one from a site comparing the F4 320GB PassMark DiskMark score against other drives and its on top.

f4.jpg


crystal512.jpg


Crystal Mark is much more consistent and correct bench scores compared to hd tune, hd tune is only good for check temps and smart info. It shows you the worst results of your drive while Crystal shows you exactly how fast it is.

Its fourth on this list faster then some SSD's blows away other drives

http://www.harddrivebenchmark.net/hdd_lookup.php?cpu=SAMSUNG+HD322GJ Its faster then OCZ Vertex 1 , that gives you idea how snappy it is.

take a look at that and that will make the decision for you 🙂 Its the next best thing to a fast SSD drive. For me 320GB is enough, Im currently using 173GB so its my primary drive and also I image it on external drive. All my DAW my apps my plugins and 13 games avg 7GB per game,, bunch of pics and fair ammount of videos... That is why I got this, because I have another WDC 320 in here and a 120GB , and I just imaged,, from the WDC 320 and placed image on new drive,, by default it puts 4KB which is wrong.. You must manually change to 512 bytes this gives 30 percent boost in speed and its the drives specs thats why.



hd tune is whack gives a lot of false figures cuz it thrashes soo much Disk Mark PassMark is a better test and here is the screenshot of that and mine compared against all drives.
 
Last edited:
lol yeah, 368MBps avg is crazy! you can download the hdtune free trial to get additional features, it lasts for 15 days before it asks you to register.

I did a lot of research on the F4 320 last night, and I know it blows the WD black 500 out of the water when doing sequential read/write, but access time was what I was worried about. According to this review it's not so great (when compared to WD blacks anyway)..

http://www.storagereview.com/samsung_spinpoint_f4_review_hd322gj

I'm pretty sure random access time is the most important thing on a boot drive, no? and determines how "snappy" everything feels.

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/...rts/h2benchw-3.12-Write-Access-Time,1008.html

Judging by these charts caviar black comes in at 6ms. F4 320 comes in at 11ms. And my F4EG comes it at 16ms, ouch! I don't know how significant any of this is to actual real world performance, but I do know I can get a WD black 500GB for a little over $50 right now...tempting. It's that or the F4 320 for $8 less, but with 2 years less warranty.
 
Last edited:
Well its latency is 8.9ms seek time and latency of 4.07

Yes that is the delay it takes to write or read a file. I used to have a Seagate Cheetah SCSI back in 1998 with a P2B it was 10k rpm. Seek time was about 8ms .

It was crazy fast compared to our experiences with Windows 98 and Windows 95 with IDE drives 7200rpm.

I guarantee you will see a boost in how fast apps launch. The latency is fine, dont believe the hd tune saying its 15ms lol ,, the spec says 8.9ms and that is fast,, a black is probably 11ms or 9ms

The SSD doesnt have that and is 0ms . Thing is 8.9ms is fast , I mean were not talking a second were talking mili second. This drive is faster then that classic 9GB Cheetah I had. put it that way and it was 10krpm scsi. hmm

Also as I said before,, on my WDC SE which is fast,, it took Thunderbird 4 seconds to load on first launch after boot up and 20 minutes of idle time to let HD thrash and load stuff into RAM and CACHE RAM. On this drive after I made it 512 bytes is took 1 second and a half for Thunderbird to load. BTW my inbox is 280mb. Pull the trigger its such a great price too.. You wont regret it, and will see how single platter totally 0pownz so the latency is sorta fooling with you.. a 6ms scsi drive with 2 platters is same as single platter @ 8 or 9ms .. thx gl
 
Last edited:
tweakboy, by your logic we should all just run Ubuntu live cds and just forget about hard drives altogether seeing as performance doesn't matter.
 
I wonder how the F4 320 would do on seek times with it's AAM adjusted.

I reran crystaldisk today and the results, especially sequential read/write is much slower. The only thing I can think is that crystaldisk benchmarks the start of "free space" on the disk, and since I've filled it a little over half, if measuring middle track speeds now instead of outer track. Can anyone confirm?

http://img710.imageshack.us/img710/3277/comparek.png
 
could you post your smart results JET? I'm wondering if you have any raw data for "program fail count". Anyone anyone else with these drives for that matter

thanks!!
 
Still waiting for it to deliver, either today or Monday. The new PC is on a table with no net access yet, it's going to take a couple days before I can switch out the old one for the new, probably mid next week. (got lots of cable and clean up work to do around the huge desk it will reside in)

Have never really looked hard at HD performance, still have HD's from '01 still running fine. LOL!
 
You guys will love the F4 320GB ,,, very nice good purchases.... thx gl

Remember by default the sector size will be 4KB , The drive spec is 512 bytes , so make sure to put that when you format and not leave cluster size on default. The speed increase is amazing. That is the only flaw but you can fix it with a proper format and choose lowest which is 512 bytes,, OR use partition wizard and change cluster size to 1 ,,,,thx
 
Back
Top