Samsung Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB $79.99 FS

$20 says this will be the most popular HotDeal thread of the day.
 
Too buy or wait for another $60 deal like a month ago I missed out on!!!
 
That was a price mistake and is never going to happen again, at least not in the next few months I bet.

This.

Might be a year before you see a price like that. You may be able to get one for $70 in a few months though.
 
kicking myself in the ass for not jumping on the $60 deal a while back. decided to revamp my server, so i snagged 4. was going to go with the WD20EARS deal on dell for 70 AR, but i am going to try the samsungs for a change. had my share of WD drives fail on me in the last two years, so what the hell, ill try em.
 
No. The F3 (7200RPM) would be like WD Black drive and the F4 (5400RPM) would be like a WD Green drive.

Don't forget that they made a "Green" F3 drive which was also 5400RPM. The F4s are faster than those because of having only 3 platters with higher density. I have four 2TB F3s and four 2TB F4s but I haven't taken the time to bench them. They are great drives, though.
 
From what i've seen personally the F3's have about 83-90MB/s transfer cap, while the F4's are around 100Mb/s.

This is personal testing, not new formats, or using as C: drives.
 
So about this firmware issue-

There's a thread over in data storage about doing it and if you google "samsung f4 problems" you'll see.

Currently, I have it setup in an IcyDock 4bay hooked up via SATA PM. Copied over 1.5TB to it and there seems to be no issue. I had problems flashing the firmware because I've never done it before, and following the instructions others had put out did not work. Their USB Bootable program does not see my flash drives for some reason :(

I ended up calling samsung to see if they have an iso I can put on CD but they said there was no issue at all with firmware for the F4 HD204UI

So, is there really a problem here??
 
I have had one of these drives for a long time, and I never updated the firmware and haven't had the issue that is stated this firmware update fixes. But I was thinking I should update the firmware anyway, but does the firmware update make you loose the data currently on the drive? I know the obvious answer is if you want to be sure go backup the data but there is over a TB of data on there and while I do have space for it temporarily on my WHS box, even at 1gbps network speeds that is a whole lot of time. And for firmware I generally have a "if it ain't broke don't fix it" policy unless there are features I want in the firmware.
 
I'm hoping that the prices fall on these drives due to the "firmware issues" so I can score up a boat load and flash the drives.:)
 
I have 8 of these on an Areca 1220 in RAID 5 and they are all running great. No firmware issues here.
 
crap... pulled on the dell.com WD Green 2TB, $90+$6 tax-$20 rebate = $76

EDIT: oh wait, WD Green 2TB changed over to 3 platter too, twice the cache... i guess i could wait on th erebate
 
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