My Benchmarks for SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI

I just set up a RAID 10 on my system with 4 of these to replace 4 of my old Seagate ST3500320AS Drives

ICH9R Controller, SW RAID, Win 7 Ultimate 64 w/ latest intel storage driver...

The Samsung drives are barely over room temp at idle, and very quiet... If they dont fail they will definately be a homerun -

Very nice. I've had my eye on the 2TB F3EGs for a Myth/NAS build. Substituting them for these is a no-brainer.

Looks nice; though i have seen the F4 5400rpm at 140MB/s read and 136MB/s write.

Nevertheless, this does make 5400rpm disks quite fast; and would lessen the need on higher rpm disks. It's faster than the 10.000rpm Velociraptor gets with sequential workloads.

parityOCP said:

Very nice. I've had my eye on the 2TB F3EGs for a Myth/NAS build. Substituting them for these is a no-brainer.

Click to expand...

Make sure your nas will format to use a 4K sector boundry, even though the drive emulates and reports 512b sectors, this will effect performance from what Ive read -

I have 3 of these "on the truck out for delivery today" from the Newegg sale. What kind of settings, offsets, or whatever do you need to do with them? I am not using them as OS drives, only storage.

najames said:

I have 3 of these "on the truck out for delivery today" from the Newegg sale. What kind of settings, offsets, or whatever do you need to do with them? I am not using them as OS drives, only storage.

Click to expand...

Well - let me first say I'm no expert -- but from the research I did, you only need to make sure you format on a multiple of 4K sectors so you do not degrade performance... The drive reports 512b sectors even though its really 4k -

Windows 7 and Vista do this by default - I played with gparted too to see if it made a difference, it did not - if you happen to be on an OS older than vista / win 7, usa a linux live disk and use Gparted to make the partition -

not bad at all

I got these drives for adding/replacing drives in my WHS server (based on Win2003) so they need to be aligned it looks like.

I can use Gparted, or it looks like I can also do it with a command in WHS. From the other website they formatted the drives, then used the diskpart command to set the offset for alignment. It looks simple enough (after a lot of reading).

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929491

Unfortunately, I'd like to update my WHS SageTV server from a Q6600 G35 motherboard to a new lower powered box. Initally just thought about getting a i3 or i5 dual core, or even an AMD quad and undervolt it. Then both brain cells fired and I thought about perhaps running it as a VM and also run another set of drives as backup for other PCs on another VM. The whole mess has been driving me freaking crazy. I have been studying this crap for a couple months trying to figure out VT-d, IOMMU, AMD Vi, or whatever it is called.