Samsung F4EG 2TB OK for WHS

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ottozylch46

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 7, 2009
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Would anyone know for certain in the Samsung Spinpoint F4EG HD204UI 2TB will work with WHS without any problems?
I'm still not 100% clear on this Advanced Format that some of the drives use.
I've read where some say its no problem, others say just stay away from them
Thanks.
 
OK. Thanks for the reply. Will try one.
I thought that the drives with the Advanced Format (such as the 2Tb WD EARS drives) were not recommended for use in WHS?
Very confused with this issue and on what to buy.
 
DON'T USE THIS IN WHS VERSION 1

if you use XP, WHS, and some versions of linux which start at Sector 63, the drive format is misaligned, and the 512k emulation does not compensate for this. This results in a 50% slowdown in write performance.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Pro...D=FW96i67l

Pros: Great drive for Windows 7 and some version of Linux.
Quite and cool.

Cons: Not suitable for Windows XP or Windows Home Server.
Not suitable for versions of Linux that force disc format to start at Sector 63.

Same alignment problems as other advance format drives, but no jumper solution to fix it for older systems. The other advance format drives on the market can be made compatible with older OS's by installing a jumper. Samsung decided to not offer this option, leaving older systems flapping in the breeze. The lack of backwards compatibility cost them a full egg.

Other Thoughts: I tested this drive extensively. In Windows 7, it will format with a starting sector of 2048, which is aligned for a 4k drive. HD Tune reports 103 MB/s. CrystalDisk reports ~130 MB/s read/write and ~40 MB/s read/write w/ 512k random.

However, if you use XP, WHS, and some versions of linux which start at Sector 63, the drive format is misaligned, and the 512k emulation does not compensate for this. Mis-aligned, HD Tune still reports 103 MB/s. However, CrsytalDisk reports ~128 MB/s sequential read write. The 512k random is ~ 40MB/s read, but only 20 MB/s write. The 4k random data suffers the same 50% slowdown during writes.

The bottom line, if you use this drive in XP, WHS, or anything else that formats starting at Sector 63, you will suffer a 50% slower write performance. Bad news for an OS.
 
Well, this would be just for the storage pool, not an OS.
Would it be usable if I connected it to my other Win7 machine, formatted with Win7 and then installed into the WHS pool?
 
ottozylch46 said:
Well, this would be just for the storage pool, not an OS.
Would it be usable if I connected it to my other Win7 machine, formatted with Win7 and then installed into the WHS pool?
Click to expand...

This I am not sure about. It would depend on if WHS does any realignment on a drive after it is installed to the pool.
 
It was my understanding that the HD204UI have an automatic "emulation" mode when they are used in an OS that doesn't properly align them.

I'm curious about this as well, I bought 4 of these to use in a box running vail refresh only to find that vail is still terribly buggy..
 
The Samsung is fine with XP, WHS, linux, etc. But if you want to optimize write performance, you just need to make sure that your partition(s) are 4KB-aligned. With Windows 7, Vista, and most recent linux distros, that should be done automatically.

With an older OS like XP, it just means that you want to partition the drive before you install your OS (or partition drives, if it is a non-OS drive). You can use the Windows Vista or Windows 7 partitioner, or you can use gparted

http://partedmagic.com/

Make sure that your first partition is 4KB aligned. I suggest starting at sector 2048, which is a 1 MB offset, since that is what Windows Vista and 7 default to.
 
tojoski said:
It was my understanding that the HD204UI have an automatic "emulation" mode when they are used in an OS that doesn't properly align them.
Click to expand...

There is no "emulation mode". The drive ALWAYS emulates 512B sectors to the OS. The issue of 4KB alignment is different. See my previous post.
 
I greatly appreciate the above information, and with all due respect to the people who responded, I am still a little confused on what my course of action should be.
Do I just install it in WHS, let it format it and add it to the pool....do I do a format in Win7 first, then add it to my WHS...or should I follow a different procedure?
Again, this is just for storage, streaming movies and music.
 
Advanced format drives are not recommended or supported in WHS. There's a support.ms.com article on this.
 
danman said:
Advanced format drives are not recommended or supported in WHS. There's a support.ms.com article on this.
Click to expand...

I'm beginning to see why. I guess Microsoft assumes that manually making a 4KB-aligned partition is going to be outside the comfort zone of most of their WHS customers.

But since most drives are moving to 4KB sectors, I wonder why Microsoft does not do an automatic update for WHS for automatic 4KB-alignment on new partitions. It would be a simple change. But I guess they want to sell WHS v2. I assume they will support 4KB sector drives on that.
 
I don't think you can pre-format a drive and then add it to the storage pool while keeping the formatting... I may have to test this when I get home
 
This person is saying you can format in Win7 and disable the use of the jumper so it doesn't go misaligned in WHS. I'm not sure how confident I am in this. Any other thoughts?

http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036263370&postcount=9

john4200 said:
I'm beginning to see why. I guess Microsoft assumes that manually making a 4KB-aligned partition is going to be outside the comfort zone of most of their WHS customers.

But since most drives are moving to 4KB sectors, I wonder why Microsoft does not do an automatic update for WHS for automatic 4KB-alignment on new partitions. It would be a simple change. But I guess they want to sell WHS v2. I assume they will support 4KB sector drives on that.
Click to expand...

Problem is WHS V2 no longer retains the NTFS format.
 
sanvara said:
Problem is WHS V2 no longer retains the NTFS format.
Click to expand...

NTFS is a filesystem. A filesystem is usually installed within a partition, and does not affect the alignment of the partition.

The only question is whether WHS insists on deleting any existing partitions on a drive that you install WHS on (or a drive you add to the pool) and then creating its own partition(s). If WHS can be persuaded to use an existing partition, then it will work fine with 4KB sector drives, if you just create an aligned partition with another program before presenting the drive to WHS.

Neb, did you test this?

Also, I am not sure about this discussion of a jumper on the Samsung HD204UI. I have not seen any documentation about a jumper on the Samsung that creates a 1 sector offset in LBAs. I am aware that Western Digital has such a jumper, and also that the Samsung does have a jumper on it, but I have not seen any documentation that the Samsung jumper can do the offset trick.

One other consideration is that you could simply use the HDD in WHS with a misaligned partition. It may not make a noticeable difference to someone who is only writing large files to the disk, since misaligned writes do not suffer a large performance drop when the writes occur in large blocks. Also, if your usage pattern is a typical write once, read many times pattern, the misalignment will have minimal effect since reads should not have a significant performance penalty on a misaligned drive.
 
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Got home too late to do anything yesterday, perhaps tonight.

From previous experience, WHS doesn't ask for any choices when adding a drive to the drive pool, it only warns you that all data will be lost on the drive that's being added. That, to me indicates that it repartitions and reformats the drive. I'll check to be sure nonetheless.
 
Even though I made sure to format the drive in the win7 box, the add drive prompt still required a format.
 
Neb said:
Even though I made sure to format the drive in the win7 box, the add drive prompt still required a format.
Click to expand...

But what does "format" mean in this context? It could mean just creating a filesystem in an existing partition.

Did you happen to check if the partition was still 4KB aligned? One easy way to do that is with AS-SSD -- it will display the alignment in green, and "OK" if it is aligned to some multiple of 4KB.
 
john4200 said:
But what does "format" mean in this context? It could mean just creating a filesystem in an existing partition.

Did you happen to check if the partition was still 4KB aligned? One easy way to do that is with AS-SSD -- it will display the alignment in green, and "OK" if it is aligned to some multiple of 4KB.
Click to expand...

Hey...new here...but just last week I added one of these drives to my WHS. Have to admit all these talk of sectors, offsets, etc...is essentially greek to me...but here is what I did and what showed after the drive was added. I may have to try AS-SSD to see what it shows.


Anyway, what I did is:

On my Win7 system, attached the drive and used diskpart to
CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY ALIGN=1024
then I formatted after that as I was trying to run some various hdd tests against it.

I then added it to my WHS to the storage pool, and when I do the wmic command, these are my results:

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name BlockSize Name StartingOffset
512 Disk #0, Partition #0 32256
512 Disk #0, Partition #1 21476206080
512 Disk #1, Partition #0 32256
512 Disk #2, Partition #0 32256

Disk #0 and Disk #1 are Samsung F3 1.5tb drives HD154UI
Disk #2 is the new F4 HD204UI

So if I understand this correctly, it looks like WHS repartitioned the drive? But the offset is identical to the 1.5tb drives? But I'm so confused by all this I don't know what all this means...especially since these drives can apparently lie to us :>

If I can add a question ....what hdd verification tools do we like for the HD204UI's? I had nothing but trouble basically. I created a USB boot key (WIn 98 files) and put the 3.01p ESTool.exe from samsung on it and when I tried to run that I got an abnormal program termination. I also tried SpinRite...connected the F4 directly to the motherboard on my Win7 machine booted to the Spinrite cd to run...it started but when I looked at it the following morning, it had stopped at some point (don't know exactly when) with a Division Overflow error. The only thing I've had success with so far is Seagate's SeaTools...I did the long generic which passed which is when I went ahead and added the drive to my storage pool. I actually bought 2 F4's but the 2nd one I plan to use at the moment for external backup since I (shame on me) haven't been doing that.
 
I would like to echo your results above. I formatted it on Win7 and checked that everything was aligned. I then added it to WHS drive pool and it repartitioned and reformatted the drive. I also tried to use an alignment tool, Paragon I think it was, to fix the partition.This said it was successful and actually didn't take very long (maybe because no data had transferred to the drive?).

Unfortunately, after that, WHS had issues and the drive was always listed as "missing" in the console and it was a bit of a pain to get it back since I couldn't remove the drive as it was already missing. Right now it's being used as landing zone for downloads and media rips before copying out to the storage pool.
 
I remoted into my WHS, tried AS SSD and it only found C: (OS) and D: (DE) drives (both show up as WD10EACS and 'bad').

I then installed Paragon Alignment Tool, all unaligned including my HD204UI. OMG the sky is falling! ;) I've actually had no problems and installed it in my WHS rig right out of the box (no messing with any jumper).

paragon.PNG


Edit: No, I'm not going to attempt to align all those!
 
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texas_nightowl said:
I then added it to my WHS to the storage pool, and when I do the wmic command, these are my results:

wmic partition get BlockSize, StartingOffset, Name BlockSize Name StartingOffset
512 Disk #0, Partition #0 32256
512 Disk #0, Partition #1 21476206080
512 Disk #1, Partition #0 32256
512 Disk #2, Partition #0 32256

Disk #0 and Disk #1 are Samsung F3 1.5tb drives HD154UI
Disk #2 is the new F4 HD204UI

So if I understand this correctly, it looks like WHS repartitioned the drive? But the offset is identical to the 1.5tb drives?
Click to expand...

32256 = 63 * 512

That (63) is the typical offset used by XP and older Windows OSs. And it is misaligned. So evidently WHS did repartition your drive.
 
This is exactly what I saw too, but I only attempted to align the newly added F4EG. That definitely didn't work. It took like 5-10 seconds or something to do it. It was properly aligned when I checked, just unreadable by WHS.

[LYL]Homer;1036352410 said:
I remoted into my WHS, tried AS SSD and it only found C: (OS) and D: (DE) drives (both show up as WD10EACS and 'bad').

I then installed Paragon Alignment Tool, all unaligned including my HD204UI. OMG the sky is falling! ;) I've actually had no problems and installed it in my WHS rig right out of the box (no messing with any jumper).



Edit: No, I'm not going to attempt to align all those!
Click to expand...
 
cbutters posted this same guide in his own thread here in the data storage section as well. Good to see more stories of it working, I'm going to be trying it later this week myself. Appreciate the confirmation.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1559559

Homebrew said:
Just thought I'd post this for you guys. I found this guide over at We Got Served on how to add a drive to the storage pool after aligning. Also works for adding drives with GPT partitions to the storage pool. I was able to use this guide to add 2 of these drives to my storage pool. So far so good. I hope it's of use to you guys.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/16580-guide-how-to-make-gpt-4k-sector-drives-and-3tb-drives-work-as-storage-pool-drives-in-whs-pp3/
Click to expand...
 
Sorry to rebump this thread but I added three of the Samsung F4EG drives to my WHS setup, which has been running very happily for the last three years, and these drives introduced nothing but problems.

Any data copied over to them and then replayed, say a 12gb BR movie, ended up with the server hardlocking and becoming unresponsive. Upon rebooting, the system would be stable for 15-20 minutes and then hard lock again. I even reinstalled the whole OS only to find the same problem occured. The hardlocking would go as soon as the drive was removed. I also tried installing them using cbutters excellent drives however the drives would end up in the pool but would have "Unknown" in the Disk ID column. I also flashed them all with the new firmware from Samsung but that made no difference either :(

In the end I gave up and sent them back to exchange for some Samsung F3 2tb drives which should work out of the box without any hard locking of the system however at some point I guess I'll have to try the F4EG's again cause the F3's are becoming rare to find :(
 
imyourzero said:
I noticed that too. Where are you getting yours from?
Click to expand...

Well as I'm UK based, I have a choice of two suppliers: Scan or EBuyer. Thankfully they seem to get a large amount of stock but then it sells out very very quickly and I haven't seen any noticies from Samsung that they are going to discontinue the F3 varients. If I can't find any, I think I'll be switching to the Hitachi's :(
 
I was not aware of any issues with these drives; I have one along with other drives in a WHS and two in my new WHS that I am converting over to; all seem to be working just fine.
 
Hudson187 said:
I was not aware of any issues with these drives; I have one along with other drives in a WHS and two in my new WHS that I am converting over to; all seem to be working just fine.
Click to expand...

My problems occured when either the drives were under heavy load, like copying a large amount of data from one drive to another when removing a disk from the pool, or when they were over 75% full.

I can only ascertain that the issue was the drives as they were the only new items added to the system in a very long time and that the hard lock issue was resolved when these drives were removed. I even updated the firmware to the latest revision as posted on [H] to no avail just in case the issue was to do with NCQ :confused:

Unfortunately after all the years of using Samsung drives, the AF varients have left a rather sour taste in my mouth :(
 
Any reason why SMART not be working on these drives? Perhaps the controller? A Supermicro aoc-sat2-mv8 is controlling them. I have installed Home Server SMART add-on to try... no go!
 
ok guys, I think it is not worth the effort to use advance format drives in WHS. Just get the older version of the drive and be happy
 
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