Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Review

Post by **FatherJack** » October 10th, 2009, 3:30

What's HD tune like? I just ran it on a 1TB Samsung I grabbed for £30 from a shop down the road - not a fantastic one, just new. It came annoyingly close to my best Raptor in parts - same ballpark at least, ~100M/s to ~130M/s, but the seek times were all over the place.

Still, seems like the gap has finally closed - be interesting to see how far they can go with the slower (than Raptor) spindle speed and where WD go next.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » October 10th, 2009, 10:21

2x F3 in raid 0:

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HD Tune Pro: Intel   Raid 0 Volume Benchmark

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 78.4 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 245.2 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 203.3 MB/sec
Access Time           : 11.8 ms
Burst Rate            : 145.7 MB/sec
CPU Usage             : -1.0%


HD Tune Pro: Intel   Raid 0 Volume Random Access

Read test

Transfer size	operations / sec	avg. access time	avg. speed
512 bytes   	84 IOPS	11 ms	0.041 MB/s
4 KB          	86 IOPS	11 ms	0.336 MB/s
64 KB        	81 IOPS	12 ms	5.115 MB/s
1 MB          	55 IOPS	17 ms	55.914 MB/s
Random     	64 IOPS	15 ms	32.148 MB/s

Nothing to compare it against really, but they utterly trounce all my 5 drive RAID 5 arrays (as expected really)

Looking forward for the W7 release, so I can piss around short stroking and using magic to make them really push raptors.

Lee · Post by **Lee** » October 10th, 2009, 12:18

Can you actually tell the difference between your F3s and F1s in real world usage?

I'm thinking about getting one then sticking my F1 in an external caddy for backups.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » October 10th, 2009, 12:27

I maybe have one F1, in a raid 5 array.

But compared to my old 150GB raptors, the F3s feel a little faster and make less noise.

As this was more a venture in getting more space, rather than a straigh upgrade, I'm very happy.

If I short stroke the drives, I'd expect the performance increase to be pretty noticeable.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » October 22nd, 2009, 14:49

Just because I've fettled my machine a bit (F3s on raid controller now)

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HD Tune Pro: HPT     DISK 1_0 Benchmark

Read transfer rate
Transfer Rate Minimum : 122.6 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Maximum : 257.0 MB/sec
Transfer Rate Average : 201.6 MB/sec
Access Time           : 11.6 ms
Burst Rate            : 165.9 MB/sec
CPU Usage             : -1.0%

HD Tune Pro: HPT     DISK 1_0 Random Access

Read test

Transfer size	operations / sec	avg. access time	avg. speed
512 bytes	87 IOPS	11 ms	0.043 MB/s
4 KB	86 IOPS	11 ms	0.339 MB/s
64 KB	83 IOPS	11 ms	5.229 MB/s
1 MB	57 IOPS	17 ms	57.857 MB/s
Random	65 IOPS	15 ms	32.866 MB/s

Appears to be marginally faster than the onboard, but it's probably more to do with the W7 install than the drives.

No more latency though, which is what I was concerned about.

Edit: Item of note: Real world test shows Raid5 array copying to the Raid0, 210MB/s about 15 minutes for 160GB of files.

Wiggy · Post by **Wiggy** » October 22nd, 2009, 16:46

Nice. I now have two of these in a Raid 0 and another 3 in Raid 5