Spinpoint F1: Samsung Overtakes With a Bang

[Boudin]

I agree with X-ray Doc -- I was all set to buy a 1TB Samsung. I need a big, fast drive for backups, but the user reports at NewEgg set off major alarms. I can't trust a potentially unreliable drive for such an important task. (It has occurred to me that unsavory competitors could have bought a few Samsung drives and deliberately loaded the "reviews" with negative comments, but there's no way to prove that, given the small amount of feedback posted on this new series of drives.)

Does anyone here have a feel for the overall longterm reliability of Samsung drives? Are they really as bad as people on the NewEgg site make them out to be?

I am a small reseller, and have built a couple of hundred systems in the past. I have had occasional problems with WD, Seagate and Maxtor drives, but the WD drives have been most reliable overall. Unfortunately, WD Corp. is now pushing its GP (Green Power) drives, which offer reduced performance. WDC no longer publishes the spin speed of those new models. I called their tech support this morning, and even they didn't know how fast their GP drives turn.

Thanks to the performance comparisons published here, it seems the GP drives must be running at about 5400 rpm. So, WD drives are off the table for my current need. Of the three brands I have used, the Maxtors have given me the most problems, so it looks like my best choice will be a Seagate 1TB 7200.11 series.

 

[jimmysmitty]

Everything but access time and IOps. This has been happening with the most recent 7200rpm drives because of bit density.

I think this is also due to the fact that the Raptors are still SATAI 150MB/s and the others are SATAII 300MB/s. But its nice to know that my simple Seagate Barracuda is faster than a Raptor. I guess the extra money may not be worth the extra access time.

I would like to see them compare these drives to the same drives in a RAID0 and see if it scales well with multiple drives. Not all do. Some tend to give less than 2x performance but I guess we will never know huh?

 

[jimmysmitty]

I agree with X-ray Doc -- I was all set to buy a 1TB Samsung. I need a big, fast drive for backups, but the user reports at NewEgg set off major alarms. I can't trust a potentially unreliable drive for such an important task. (It has occurred to me that unsavory competitors could have bought a few Samsung drives and deliberately loaded the "reviews" with negative comments, but there's no way to prove that, given the small amount of feedback posted on this new series of drives.)

Does anyone here have a feel for the overall longterm reliability of Samsung drives? Are they really as bad as people on the NewEgg site make them out to be?

I am a small reseller, and have built a couple of hundred systems in the past. I have had occasional problems with WD, Seagate and Maxtor drives, but the WD drives have been most reliable overall. Unfortunately, WD Corp. is now pushing its GP (Green Power) drives, which offer reduced performance. WDC no longer publishes the spin speed of those new models. I called their tech support this morning, and even they didn't know how fast their GP drives turn.

Thanks to the performance comparisons published here, it seems the GP drives must be running at about 5400 rpm. So, WD drives are off the table for my current need. Of the three brands I have used, the Maxtors have given me the most problems, so it looks like my best choice will be a Seagate 1TB 7200.11 series.

I would recommen Seagate. But I think Maxtor will not be as bad as they were to you seeing as how they are now owned by Seagate.

My experience with Seagate and WD has been different than you. I still have 2 120GB Seagate Baracudda SATAI in RAID0 and they are 5 years old. The only WD I had didn't like its nice little PC home and decided to lose all my data. Either way Seagate has great stuff and I guess WD does as well.

My only question is what happened to Seagates Cheeta drives? The ones that ran at 15kRPMs? Anyone else remember them?

 

[Karlsbad]

I would really like to see the follow up with more mainstream capacities promised in the conclusion. It seems there can be a significant performance difference between different capacity drives of the same series.

There appear to be almost no reviews and/or comparisons of 7200.11 and SE16 in 500 and 750 or 640 for that matter, surely there are more users interested in these capacities than 1 TB.