Caviar Black 1TB or Spinpoint F3 1TB?

Vyedmic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 20, 2007
Messages
222
Alright,
Last week I ordered parts for my p55 i7 rig and when I got it the harddrive(ordered Spinpoint F3) was missing. So I phoned up, helpful guy explained that they had one in stock but the box was damaged so they didn't ship it but they can send me Caviar Black as a replacement for the same price as a goodwill gesture. Got it next day and was quite content, it's about £8 difference.

Today I recieved the Spinpoint F3. Being a honest person, karma, christmas spirit and all that sh*t I want to send one back. Question is which one do I send?

Is Caviar that much better? Is Samsung that much quieter? What would you do? Thanks.
 
Run some benchmarks and see which one performs better. Send back the one with lower score.

I would probably keep the Black since it has longer warranty IMO. WD Blacks are the best on the market, but so the F3.
 
Don't exactly know how it works in e-tailers but if I open both of them they'll probably have to sell it as a B-stock or something. Some employee's gonna have to pay for it and I don't want that. So I think I have to choose without testing. Or are they able to flash it into unused state(smart and all) and then seal it again?

After checking some posted benchmarks, F3 is a bit faster in HDTach average read/writes while Caviar likes Iometer quite a bit more. I am into audio so I guess that HDTach shows better sequential performance from F3 which may be of bigger benefit to me than iops. Am I wrong?
 
F3 is the fastest 1TB (and 500GB?) drive on the markey afaik. I have 2 of them and a F1. TBH there wont be much in it, but I do a lot of photo editing with massive files so I wanted the fastest sequential read/writes I could get. IOPS arnt as important since its not a database getting pounded by loads of requests.
 
F3 is the fastest 1TB (and 500GB?) drive on the markey afaik. I have 2 of them and a F1. TBH there wont be much in it, but I do a lot of photo editing with massive files so I wanted the fastest sequential read/writes I could get. IOPS arnt as important since its not a database getting pounded by loads of requests.

Cheers mate. Exactly my line of thinking. I think the price premium on the Caviar is more brand based than anything else. Also F3 will be quieter which is only a good thing. Looks like we have a winner.
 
F3 is the fastest 1TB (and 500GB?) drive on the markey afaik. I have 2 of them and a F1. TBH there wont be much in it, but I do a lot of photo editing with massive files so I wanted the fastest sequential read/writes I could get. IOPS arnt as important since its not a database getting pounded by loads of requests.

I comepletely disagree that IOPS are not important because its not a database.
IOPS are indicative of random IO performance and most of what you do on your computer is random.

When the guy is listening to music, im sure he will be doing other task on the computer and the more task you are doing at any given time is going to force the HDD to have to read from different areas of the HDD.
That makes IOPS pretty important.

Sequential for most people should not be the most important #. Its not like there music and movies are going to play any faster.
 
I comepletely disagree that IOPS are not important because its not a database.
IOPS are indicative of random IO performance and most of what you do on your computer is random.

When the guy is listening to music, im sure he will be doing other task on the computer and the more task you are doing at any given time is going to force the HDD to have to read from different areas of the HDD.
That makes IOPS pretty important.

Sequential for most people should not be the most important #. Its not like there music and movies are going to play any faster.

I'd like to use it as a recording machine and bar some OS and recording software IO ops it will be continuous file creation. Do you think that sequential write speed is not important in this case?
 
I'd like to use it as a recording machine and bar some OS and recording software IO ops it will be continuous file creation. Do you think that sequential write speed is not important in this case?

I never said sequentials were not important. I think IOPS and response time is more important.

If your apps and OS are going to be on this drive then you cant just be like "IOPS dont mean anything"

Theres always a tradeoff somewhere. But you need to look at exactly the activity that will occurring and pick the best for that instance. HDDs are not a one size fits all by any means.

If you are like me you have one drive for OS/Apps and then do all your recording to a different device. so you don't have these IO problems.
Now if you are going to try to write 3 things at the same time, then all of a sudden IOPS become more important than sequential because now all of a sudden your disk activity is no longer sequential because it is trying to do three things at the same and the HDDs heads are bouncing all over switching between tasks.
 
I never said sequentials were not important. I think IOPS and response time is more important.

If your apps and OS are going to be on this drive then you cant just be like "IOPS dont mean anything"

Theres always a tradeoff somewhere. But you need to look at exactly the activity that will occurring and pick the best for that instance. HDDs are not a one size fits all by any means.

If you are like me you have one drive for OS/Apps and then do all your recording to a different device. so you don't have these IO problems.
Now if you are going to try to write 3 things at the same time, then all of a sudden IOPS become more important than sequential because now all of a sudden your disk activity is no longer sequential because it is trying to do three things at the same and the HDDs heads are bouncing all over switching between tasks.

I also never said that IOPS mean nothing. Your suggestion for separate OS drive is a very good one and I'd like to get a SSD for this purpose later down the line. So far I have a basic build with just one drive(in hindsight I should have thought about this little bit more) so would you recommend to send F3 back and stay with Caviar?

I still think that when nothing else will run apart from OS and good recording software(Cubase, REAPER, ProTools) majority of the disk activity while recording will be file creation and F3 shines in this area.
 
I also never said that IOPS mean nothing. Your suggestion for separate OS drive is a very good one and I'd like to get a SSD for this purpose later down the line. So far I have a basic build with just one drive(in hindsight I should have thought about this little bit more) so would you recommend to send F3 back and stay with Caviar?

I still think that when nothing else will run apart from OS and good recording software(Cubase, REAPER, ProTools) majority of the disk activity while recording will be file creation and F3 shines in this area.

If you are running a single drive sytem you wont notice a difference between the two drives probably and the F3 is a great drive.

I was just pointing on out that the other guy was ignoring a major factor and you shouldnt do that.

I think you will be pleased with the F3
 
+1 for the F3, I have 2 500's in a Raid 0 for storage and a 500 for OS drive, and I couldn't be more pleased.
 
Does the Samsung have a 5 year warranty as well?
 
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