Samsung F4EG

Wait for the Samsung F4 Ecogreen drives. They will supposedly draw almost 1/3 less power than even the existing F3 and the F3 already wins against the WD20EARS according to this review:

http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_caviar_green_2tb_review_wd20ears

The Samsung drives also, in my experience, are less likely to be DOA or fail under heavy use and/or RAID situations. I've found them to be very reliable drives over the last 5 years.
 
They are available for purchase at newgg now (at the same price as the f3's - $129). The F3's supposedly had some issues in RAID, do we have any info that this has changed with the F4's?

The power savings is nice, but building huge NAS servers really isn't for people who are penny pinching on utility bills... I'm not willing to give an ounce on reliability to gain lower power consumption. That said, if I can lower energy usage and not give up anything in performance or reliability, of course I would take it.
 
mikesm said:
They are available for purchase at newgg now (at the same price as the f3's - $129). The F3's supposedly had some issues in RAID, do we have any info that this has changed with the F4's?

The power savings is nice, but building huge NAS servers really isn't for people who are penny pinching on utility bills... I'm not willing to give an ounce on reliability to gain lower power consumption. That said, if I can lower energy usage and not give up anything in performance or reliability, of course I would take it.
Click to expand...


Western Digital actually went out of their way to recommend against using some of their drives for RAID due to problems that they have when configured as such. Many of the users experienced these issues. As far as long term reliability, Samsung seems to have a better record in the last few years--that's speaking both from personal experience (on my personal home servers and PCs as well as at work as an admin for a telecom company) and what I've been reading out on the "Internets..." :D

Also, this thread is specifically about green high-capacity drives is it not? And yes, it is actually exactly system administrators who are building huge NAS servers who started to realize that they needed to start thinking about saving power because it really did save a significant amount of money when done right--and saving that money is important too. It's actually less likely that someone just looking to setup a couple of drives would need to worry about 5-10 watts here or there. Now a 14-28 TB server group? Yeah, I'd be seriously looking at how much that would cost to run 24/7...
 
RavenZero said:
Western Digital actually went out of their way to recommend against using some of their drives for RAID due to problems that they have when configured as such. Many of the users experienced these issues. As far as long term reliability, Samsung seems to have a better record in the last few years--that's speaking both from personal experience (on my personal home servers and PCs as well as at work as an admin for a telecom company) and what I've been reading out on the "Internets..." :D

Also, this thread is specifically about green high-capacity drives is it not? And yes, it is actually exactly system administrators who are building huge NAS servers who started to realize that they needed to start thinking about saving power because it really did save a significant amount of money when done right--and saving that money is important too. It's actually less likely that someone just looking to setup a couple of drives would need to worry about 5-10 watts here or there. Now a 14-28 TB server group? Yeah, I'd be seriously looking at how much that would cost to run 24/7...
Click to expand...

I have about 16 TB of formatted space using about 16 spindles. Going from 8 watts per drive in normal duty to 6 watts per drive in normal duty saves 32 watts of power, less than one of my light bulbs for my outside lights. Is this worth it to me to lengthen access time by using 5900 RPM drives instead of 7200? No...
 
yeah but less electricity, slower hard drives, less heat, less noise, and if I'm just streaming HD streams, do I need the extra speed?
 
I would argue that the less heat generated and the less mechanical parts, the higher the reliability. That makes the Samsung F4 do very good theoretically since it packs 2TB in just 3 platters; very casual drive. The higher density might increase BER or Bit-Error-Rate, but the 5400rpm part is simply smart.

With 5400rpm you get 75% of the sequential performance of 7200rpm disks with the same platter density, but only half the friction, heat and power consumption. Less vibrations, less metal contraction/expansion. This is all very important for HDD reliability. HDDs are very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Meaning, it's far worse to have a drive drop or rise in temperature rapidly, than it is to have them running at a continuously high temperature.

With 7200rpm disks, you often would want to cool your disks as they could heat up pretty fast even when doing nothing. If that means you use fans to apply direct airflow on the HDDs, then if only one side is cooled and the other is not, then you still have very bad metal contraction/expansion/twisting, which might increase its chance on failure within its economical lifetime.

5400rpm disks should require no additional cooling, with just some tolerance between the disks for natural airflow. This makes them heat up very consistently and slowly (i.e. all parts are about the same temperature). It's ideal for any NAS.

So from a reliability perspective, 5400rpm is great. But what about performance? Well if you look at these drives to store large amounts of 'mass storage' data then that often means large files. Those are accessed sequentially and 5400rpm disks do great at that. They often compete with 7200rpm disks causing less than 25% performance difference, because the 5400rpm disks may have higher capacity platters than its 7200rpm counterpart.

It would be funny to do sequential benchmarks on Velociraptor 10.000rpm and new 666GB-platter 5400rpm and see the 5400rpm outperforms the raptor.

Now what about random access? Well the times when you had just one HDD for everything is over. Now you use SSD for your OS/applications and HDD for mass storage data. HDDs will ALWAYS SUCK GREATLY at random I/O. Live with it. 10.000rpm or even 100.000rpm isn't going to change that. HDDs are serial devices. In fact, you might see high-rpm disks die out to a niche market, and 5400rpm being the new standard. It makes sense to me, given current developments with SSDs.
 
Nicely put sub.mesa

Faster is not alway better just depends on what your demands are for your server.
 
mikesm said:
I have about 16 TB of formatted space using about 16 spindles. Going from 8 watts per drive in normal duty to 6 watts per drive in normal duty saves 32 watts of power, less than one of my light bulbs for my outside lights. Is this worth it to me to lengthen access time by using 5900 RPM drives instead of 7200? No...
Click to expand...

Nobody is talking about 7200 rpm drives or slightly shorter access times in this thread at all. That's not the point... ;)

--In addition, an array like that is going to take far more power to keep cool than an array of slightly slower drives that use less power and generate less heat and vibration. Even the power supply (or supplies) necessary for the array(s) may need to be bumped up and that could be less power efficient and also generate even more heat. Several factors that many people don't bother to consider. But, again, we're not really talking about faster drives in this thread are we? :D
 
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sub.mesa said:
I would argue that the less heat generated and the less mechanical parts, the higher the reliability. That makes the Samsung F4 do very good theoretically since it packs 2TB in just 3 platters; very casual drive. The higher density might increase BER or Bit-Error-Rate, but the 5400rpm part is simply smart.

With 5400rpm you get 75% of the sequential performance of 7200rpm disks with the same platter density, but only half the friction, heat and power consumption. Less vibrations, less metal contraction/expansion. This is all very important for HDD reliability. HDDs are very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Meaning, it's far worse to have a drive drop or rise in temperature rapidly, than it is to have them running at a continuously high temperature.

With 7200rpm disks, you often would want to cool your disks as they could heat up pretty fast even when doing nothing. If that means you use fans to apply direct airflow on the HDDs, then if only one side is cooled and the other is not, then you still have very bad metal contraction/expansion/twisting, which might increase its chance on failure within its economical lifetime.

5400rpm disks should require no additional cooling, with just some tolerance between the disks for natural airflow. This makes them heat up very consistently and slowly (i.e. all parts are about the same temperature). It's ideal for any NAS.

So from a reliability perspective, 5400rpm is great. But what about performance? Well if you look at these drives to store large amounts of 'mass storage' data then that often means large files. Those are accessed sequentially and 5400rpm disks do great at that. They often compete with 7200rpm disks causing less than 25% performance difference, because the 5400rpm disks may have higher capacity platters than its 7200rpm counterpart.

It would be funny to do sequential benchmarks on Velociraptor 10.000rpm and new 666GB-platter 5400rpm and see the 5400rpm outperforms the raptor.

Now what about random access? Well the times when you had just one HDD for everything is over. Now you use SSD for your OS/applications and HDD for mass storage data. HDDs will ALWAYS SUCK GREATLY at random I/O. Live with it. 10.000rpm or even 100.000rpm isn't going to change that. HDDs are serial devices. In fact, you might see high-rpm disks die out to a niche market, and 5400rpm being the new standard. It makes sense to me, given current developments with SSDs.
Click to expand...

Excellent points to read for people who seem to be only interested in printed specs and not real world performance...
 
sub.mesa said:
With 7200rpm disks, you often would want to cool your disks as they could heat up pretty fast even when doing nothing. If that means you use fans to apply direct airflow on the HDDs, then if only one side is cooled and the other is not, then you still have very bad metal contraction/expansion/twisting, which might increase its chance on failure within its economical lifetime.
Click to expand...

Not that I'm the least bit correct, but I would think that the disk would be spinning so quickly that this wouldn't really be an issue. Ideally you would cool the drive from all directions, but even with air blowing on just one side wouldn't the platter be spinning so fast that it would maintain a constant temperature? I can't imagine it cooling down when it rotates past the fan side and heating back up on the other side, at least not enough to make a difference. But again, I don't claim to know anything, just basically randomly blabbering. :)
 
The HDD is one piece of metal bounded together with bolts, if temperature rises in the lower part but lowers in the upper part due to a ventilator blowing only on that side, then you get a difference in the HDD temperature internally.

The temperature of the platters individually wouldn't vary that much, but still i would think this could cause wear and tear on the drive, increasing probability of failure. I think of HDDs as a collection of mechanical parts each which can fail independently and potentially causing the whole machine to break. The better environment you expose your mechanical parts to, the longer it will endure. At least that's my personal view on HDD failure.
 
sub.mesa said:
The temperature of the platters individually wouldn't vary that much, but still i would think this could cause wear and tear on the drive, increasing probability of failure. I think of HDDs as a collection of mechanical parts each which can fail independently and potentially causing the whole machine to break. The better environment you expose your mechanical parts to, the longer it will endure. At least that's my personal view on HDD failure.
Click to expand...

Also just happens to be how you would actually go about figuring the reliability of the entire system (system in this case being a hard drive)... so it is kind of the univerasal view :)
 
Looki to purchase two of these as PPU drives in my Flexraid build.

Currently using 15xSamsung F3 1TB 7200rpm HDDs, has there been any direct comparison between the two as of yet? Should I look into the WD alternatives, stick with 2xSamsung F3 1TB 7200rpm or...?
 
Just picked three of these up today, been hearing alot about 4K sector and having to align properly - how is the best way to go about this?

Note: This is not an OS HDD
 
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