Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive HD204UI/Z4
by Samsung
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Category: CE
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Digital Photo Product Details
Manufacturer: SamsungModel: SMHHD204UI
Product features:
- Capacity: 2TB Rotational Speed: 5400 RPM Cache: 32 MB
- Interface: SATA 3.0Gbps Max. External Transfer Rate: 300 MB/s
- Seek Time:Average: 8.9 ms Average Latency: 5.52 ms
- Shock: Operating: 70G @ 1/2 sine pulse Non-operating: 300G @ 1/2 sine pulse
- Power Requirements: Voltage: +5V ?±5%, +12V ?±10% Spin-up Current (Max.): 2.0 A Seek (typical): 5.7
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive HD204UI/Z4
Customer Review: Not stellar but good performance for the price
Summary: 4 Stars
Based on reviews, I thought these would be good drives to use to upgrade my RAID based system. In all fairness, these are not RE drives, but 2TB RE drives cost more than I wanted to spend. My older drives were Samsung RE drives, but only 1TB each.
RAID edition drives are nice to have. They coordinate with each other. They are fault tolerant in ways that individual drives are not. They power up and down in sequence, so when I turn my computer off or put it to sleep, I hear the drives turn off at one second intervals with the computer powering down one second after the final drive. They survived catastrophic "blue screen" Windows failures without ever having to rebuild. And nicest of all, their performance blew these 2TB drives away.
With these 2TB drives in non-RAID mode, I was able to get speeds that were in the neighborhood of what other reviewers were getting. In RAID0 mode, I was shockingly disappointed. I'm using an Intel controller that uses their matrix RAID technology. With the older RE drives, I was able to have a lightning fast RAID0 array for the OS, a very fast RAID0 volume (in the Windows sense of volume) for ephemeral media, or anything I could afford to lose in a catastrophe, although I never once lost anything due to hardware or controller problems. I also had a RAID5 backup partition for my OS, and a large RAID5 partition that offered reasonable protection for my other data. (I still backed things up regularly of course.) In my configuration, all media libraries were kept off the OS disk, so I could restore the OS quickly if needed without needing to worry about data files, and vice versa.
I tried replicating the environment with these drives. I was able to get usable performance out of them, but if I tried copying huge files across the network, the performance of the OS became degraded significantly. I never got throughput on the RAID0 volume that came close to the RAID5 volume, although it should have been much faster. Ultimately, I ended up using one drive stand-alone, and putting two of them in a RAID1 array. The performance is more than adequate for my purposes, but it's still possible to run things that cause momentary pauses in other tasks.
Some people are concerned with the 5400 RPM speed. In reality, the platters are the same size as they were for my 1TB drives, so the heads need to move about half the distance to read the same amount of contiguous data. Rotations take longer, but the net effect of 5400RPM is not what users might expect.
I use the computer primarily as a media center. Assuming the average one hour HD TV program is 7GB, and I want to record four shows at once, watch another, and stream another to another part of the house, I don't want to lose speed. But considering that all this happens in real time, it's only 1/3600 of the file that is read or written per second on average, so the throughput will still far exceed my needs. But if I want to copy one of those recordings across my network, I can no longer do it in 2.5 minutes, let alone without affecting performance. The saving grace is that my OS is on a disk that's separate from much of my data.
Overall, the performance is not stellar, and you can't expect to get RE performance out of these. But you can expect to get performance that is very good for the price, and my history with Samsung drives has made me feel comfortable with their reliability. These drives are certainly quiet enough for my media center, so overall they may be the best (but not ideal) solution to my current need. Windows 7 gives them a WEI score of 5.9 on my system, which doesn't seem much worse than the 6.3 that my old drives got. But I would not recommend copying several files of a few hundred GB concurrently while expecting the computer to maintain full performance on everything else.
Description of Samsung Spinpoint F4EG 2 TB SATA2 5400rpm 32 MB Hard Drive HD204UI/Z4
2TB 3.5 INCH DRIVES,FDB/32MB BufferDigital Cameras & Photo Categories
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