Is the Samsung F1 still the drive of choice?

[TooNice]

Yeah, that confused me even more. You started with a budget of around £60 then mentioned something that's probably going to be launched at over £200

[fedora]

Yeah, the WD 1TB Black is the best drive out there at the capacity as far as I'm concerned, but the F1 is still an excellent drive, and cheaper (coming from the guy who owns seven of them )

After a dead WD drive (the only one in the past 8 years) and the noise problem with the WD Raptor, I would never touch them.

[Jay]

the noise issue with a raptor was a 10K spindle!

[fedora]

the noise issue with a raptor was a 10K spindle!

Fair enough. But I am sure most people would agree raptor (or whatever they are called now) has been to the end of the road - you either choose the TB drives for storage or SSD for performance.

[Jace007]

fedora yeah your right there, the Velocaraptor hhd have had their day, and with prices dropping fast for SSD which are alot faster they are worth every penny. 120GB SSD for O/S and games is cool. Early tests on Windows 7 systems look impressive.

[jim]

After a dead WD drive (the only one in the past 8 years) and the noise problem with the WD Raptor, I would never touch them.

Well, go back 3 years and everybody seemed to be saying that Seagate were the gods of all things disky, and then they released those drives (were they 1.5TB?) with the dodgy firmware and suddenly they weren't cream of the crop any more. Then WD and Seagate were mostly seen on an even stage.

The Deathstars are still known as Deathstars despite it being heck knows how long since they were actually dying all the time, people don't trust Samsung because lots of people reported failed F1 Spinpoints on the web, I didn't trust Maxtor after I put an old Maxtor drive in my machine, which promptly broke and slowed my PC right down. Even now that Maxtor is owned by Seagate I don't think I could bring myself to buy one of their drives.

At the end of the day, hard drives fail every now and again so each person you speak to has their own opinion about what is a good brand, and what is a bad brand... I don't honestly think there's much in it to be honest.

[djfarmo]

Over the years I've bought a lot of different HDDs, both for myself and for builds for other people. I personally suffered two losses of Deathstars which has forever put me off IBM/Hitachi; I used to put Maxtors in machines I built, but they were about as refined and reliable as a Lada; more recently I had a WD Raptor fry its controller board (my C drive as well!) and the amount of reviews I read warning about issues with F1's makes me worry about all the media I have sat on the F1 in my machine...

Put simply, the only brand of HDD that I have never had a problem with or worry about is Seagate. I know they usually cost a bit more, but when I throw together a new rig in October any conventional HDDs I buy will be Seagate.

[Vimeous]

Both the previous two posters illustrate the situation with hard drive manufacturers ably.

The issue with the 40Gb Deathstars and Fujitsu drives is long gone but not easily forgotten. In fact any failure causes distrust where data is lost but we're lucky there's such a wide choice that we can forego manufacturers we've had issues with.

Privately for me Seagates have been the least reliable and while I have had Maxtor failures considering the number of drives I've had it's not as bad as it seems. Mind you all of the failures are from the Seagate era......
At work it's a similar story with IBM, Fujitsu, Maxtor and Seagate all suffering repeated terminal failures. However it's very rare these are within the first three years and so lifespans aren't unreasonable.

As always listen to the body of experience and make your choice. Then backup!


N.B. My siggie contains 2 Samsungs, 8 Maxtors, and 6 Western Digitals. All but the Sammys are supposedly RAID level drives. Crucially atm they work. Read into that what you will.

[TooNice]

The Velociraptor is quieter than most 7.2k RPM drives: http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...1=361&devCnt=2 (and faster too).

SSD's time will come, but the price is still (too) high, and it's not really dropping that fast (there are months where prices actually increase).

I also note that Seagate had that rather infamous firmware issue, so they are hardly in the clear in my book. Ultimately, use enough drives and you'll run into one that'll fail you. I tend to look at individual models, the Deskstar of the old is completely different from the Deskstar today so it doesn't really make sense to still hold them against them.

[Stu C]

To go back to the earlier question, I have a 1TB Caviar Black that is audible when it has a thrashing session, but 95% of the time I don't hear/notice it.

[TooNice]

@arthurleung, I considered the 1.5TB for a while, but it too is noisy and I think I'll be putting a fresh install of windows on it and using it as my OS drive, so speed does matter

I am formatting a 1.5TB F2 from a HD Dock (no enclosure) now and it is not noisy at all. I dare not say that it's inaudible as I am not using my near silent system, but I can't hear it over my 'normal' system. I'll see if it'll make more noise once I start moving files.

[Jace007]

Open up the Hard Drive and spray some WD40 it'll sort it out LOL

[arthurleung]

Both the previous two posters illustrate the situation with hard drive manufacturers ably.

The issue with the 40Gb Deathstars and Fujitsu drives is long gone but not easily forgotten. In fact any failure causes distrust where data is lost but we're lucky there's such a wide choice that we can forego manufacturers we've had issues with.

Privately for me Seagates have been the least reliable and while I have had Maxtor failures considering the number of drives I've had it's not as bad as it seems. Mind you all of the failures are from the Seagate era......
At work it's a similar story with IBM, Fujitsu, Maxtor and Seagate all suffering repeated terminal failures. However it's very rare these are within the first three years and so lifespans aren't unreasonable.

As always listen to the body of experience and make your choice. Then backup!


N.B. My siggie contains 2 Samsungs, 8 Maxtors, and 6 Western Digitals. All but the Sammys are supposedly RAID level drives. Crucially atm they work. Read into that what you will.

Most of the reliability issue can be solved by using RAID-1/5/6. Seagate, Hitachi, WD, Samsung, Maxtor all have their fair share of failure.

The worst of all kind is the one like Seagate's firmware problem. It frequently wreck RAID arrays (even though the disk is fine!) even with the new firmware.

IMO the current generation (7200.11 and 5900.12) Seagate drives are fundamentally flawed. One of my friend had 8 of them in RAID5 and it soft-failed, destroying the RAID table and took me about 2 weeks to "recover". Another friend of mine get BSOD every hour and have no money to replace the disk.

RAID level or not, drives do fail. Me and a couple of friends have a total of about 60 drives, about 1:1 split of consumer and "enterprise" drive. The failure rate is about the same. You really only paying for the extra warranty.

[aidanjt]

Fair enough. But I am sure most people would agree raptor (or whatever they are called now) has been to the end of the road - you either choose the TB drives for storage or SSD for performance.

Not really. By the time an SSD has written itself to death, the Velociraptor will still carry on spinning with many more years of life left in 'em. Then you have to compare prices, you can get more velociraptor and storage for your money. The disk is also optimised for many parallel disk operations. SSDs start getting jammed up with 2 or 3 processes trying to do I/O at the same time.

Velociraptors and SSDs are aiming to do different things. You can't just say SSD > Veloicraptor, and that's it. It really depends on what you're doing with the disk.

[EarlGrey]

Not really. By the time an SSD has written itself to death, the Velociraptor will still carry on spinning with many more years of life left in 'em. Then you have to compare prices, you can get more velociraptor and storage for your money. The disk is also optimised for many parallel disk operations. SSDs start getting jammed up with 2 or 3 processes trying to do I/O at the same time.

Velociraptors and SSDs are aiming to do different things. You can't just say SSD > Veloicraptor, and that's it. It really depends on what you're doing with the disk.

Not really

I think SSDs are at the point now where they are the definitive way to improve performance in your machine - if you can afford it. Still too expensive for me, but I'm hoping they drop sufficiently in price by the new year to consider getting one

Anand has done a great roundup of SSDs, which is a worthwhile read for anyone interested.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/sho...px?i=3631&p=20

[kalniel]

Not really. By the time an SSD has written itself to death, the Velociraptor will still carry on spinning with many more years of life left in 'em.

I'm not sure that's true - it can take a very long time indeed for an SSD to write itself to death, and it's not really death in that case anyway as you can still read the data fine. But a mechanical break and it's far harder to get the data.

The disk is also optimised for many parallel disk operations. SSDs start getting jammed up with 2 or 3 processes trying to do I/O at the same time.

That's the wrong way around - mechanical drives get jammed up with many parrallel disk operations, SSDs on the other hand can cope with many more I/Os at multiple depths.