Terabyte drives: WD GP or Samsung F1

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Charlie_D

Gawd
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Mar 7, 2007
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I'm wondering if anyone here has first hand experience with either or both drives? I'm going to pick up one or the other in the next week or so and I can't seem to decide, so I'm going to let my fellow forum members do it for me :p

The drive will be going into my mythbox to replace the aged, venerable 500GB seagate that's currently in residence. The box is passively cooled other than the power supply fan, so temperatures are important, as are reliability and noise (of course).

I've never had any real RMA issues with either company, both are fairly easy to deal with. I've RMA'd a lot more WD drives in the past, but that was a while ago now (some of their 20GB and 80GB drives were lemons, we had a tonne go bad).

Frankly, I'm torn and don't want to think about it anymore; that's where you guys come in :D

I've read multiple reviews on each. What I'm looking for here, as mentioned above, is first-hand knowledge.

 
Well, since its gonna be in your HTPC I'm gonna assume you're probably not running some sort of RAID setup. If you were gonna run RAID now or in the future, I would shy away from the GP drive, but otherwise it sounds perfect for your application.
 
Someone started a HD Tune thread, I posted some of my drives in there. Might want to see if someone posts their GP or F1 drive in there. Or if you see someone post that they have one elsewhere invite them to benchmark it and post there.
 
i wouldn't be jumping on a 1TB F1 drive right now, seems to be quite a few bad drives around.

the GP will be more quiet, run colder and i'd say more reliable also...it's also slower due to being a 5.4K rpm drive but in real terms it's no slouch either.
 
Personally I would go for a Seagate, but thats just me. I've had the GP drives (dozens of them) and quite frankly, I wasn't happy with the end result (incompatibility on high end raid controllers and high end onboard controllers).
 
I've run Seagate drives in my various PVRs for a few years, however the drives keep getting louder, especially during seeks. That's the only reason I'm not considering them this time around.

It sounds like most people are leaning toward the GP drive. My only reservation on them was that the load / unload cycles seem to rise so rapidly, especially in a PVR environment. That said, a drive isn't guaranteed to fail when it passes the max, and I have 10 - 15 year old drives that are still hale and hearty, so....

Unless anyone else chimes in, GP it is :)
 
If you dont care about noise and want raid -> Segate

GP drives are excelent though if your not goign to run raid, and want a reliable cool quite drive. They are not terribly slow, in fact they are pretty fast for their spindle speeds. I have a raptor 150 and of course it is faster, but I don't notice much differece using it as a storage drive vs my WD 400GB and it runs LOADS cooler and quiter. I dont know about the load/unload leves your talking about but use 64k blocks when formatting for the segment that will store the PVR data if you have multiple tuners.

I had to RMA a WD once, but it looked liek it was thrown off the roof upon delivery (SSF's DHL or UPS or whatever). Other than that I have yet to have a failure. (it will happen eventualy as with any manufacturer). For raid arrays though either RE drives or segates enterprise drives are better.
 
The drive is rated for 300k load / unload cycles, (unloading and loading the heads) according to the documentation. That said, I know a lot of drives live far beyond that number... but it'd be nice if there was an option to disable their intellipark thing
 
mouawad said:
i wouldn't be jumping on a 1TB F1 drive right now, seems to be quite a few bad drives around.

the GP will be more quiet, run colder and i'd say more reliable also...it's also slower due to being a 5.4K rpm drive but in real terms it's no slouch either.
Click to expand...

If your are referring to hutil error, Samsung issued a statement that the error stems from an error inside the hutil itself and there is no known problem with the drive. Here is the statement, it's in German though.

http://www.hartware.de/news_44256.html
 
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