Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ review

Liggy

I just posted the article Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ review.

Read the full article here: http://www.cdfreaks.com/review/15169...D103UJ-review/

Feel free to add your comments below.

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guest

ant these the drives that everyone on the net is complaining about,like 1 out of 2 breaking within a month ? realy cheap and crap is everyone here asleep at the wheel or what!

KBDE

Fast and silent. But these things also have a very high failure rate. Bad sectors is the nasty cause. Have to RMA 2 out of 2 within half a year.

Liggy

I could only test my own drive and it hasn't failed on me yet.

KBDE

You can check if the disc is (going) to have problems by checking the smart status. Download for example hddscan ( http://hddscan.com ) Look at Current Pending Sector Count these are corrected bad sectors. (if this value starts increasing be warned!) For this disk Reallocation Sector Count = 10. This means that a maximum of 10 sectors can be corrected. You can also check Uncorrectable Sector Count. Ofcourse this is even worse and i would RMA the disc at this point. The problem is that there is not really an alternative to these discs. Other brands are slower/smaller/noiser/more expensive or have even worse reliability (1,5TB Seagate).

xu477577153

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guest

Hi Had thre of these and they all craped out within three months. All they are good for is paper wights.

LaptopNomad

Bought 3 in a batch with production date june 2009. Two crashed in the first 2 weeks. These drives have issue's with SATA compatibility, high temperatures, spin-up time fluctuations and mysterious writes to partition table.
My verdict: don't buy, very low quality product.
See my website for more testing details.

dynsmerling

Hello
Please help!!

I have a Asrock k8 Combo-z motherbord which will not detect the harddrive Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ. I have tried to look in the cmos and it showes that it should bee there by looking at the boot menue, but not when looking in the ide menue

LaptopNomad

Set the UDMA speed of the HD103UJ. from 3 (SATA2) to 1.5 Gb/sec (SATA1) and try again. You need a system that connects with the drive to so do. ESTOOL can be downloaded from the Samsung website.

NBR

are these drives are really THAT BAD?

i got one about a year ago ( late Oct / Early Nov 2008 ) and it's been great so far to this day. (maybe i am lucky?)

but i guess all those failure rates cant be wrong if there is people complaining. the main reason i got one is because Samsung brand generally seems like a good product and they seem to be the fastest drives in there class due to the 3 platters vs 4-5 in everyone else so they have the best transfer speeds etc.

LaptopNomad

With increasing disk capacity (1 Tb is a lot), reliability becomes more and more an issue in single disk storage. Backups of 1Tb disks in single disk mode is a bit of a pain.

Time will tell for the HD103UJ. Only dare to use them in RAID config. Many issue's seem to point to SATA-2 compatibility, which manifests itself in early use of the disk. The head clicking, the high operating temp etc, doesn't sound good.

Keep an eye on SMART attributes, assuming the function is implemented without glitches.

DaddyRover

I got this drive a short while ago and I am not getting the same performance out of these drives as seen in these benchmarks.
I'm running Windows xp Professional SP3
On an Asus P5q motherboard and E8400 cpu.
I tried configuring the drives both as IDE and AHCI which makes no difference at all. Did a few benchmarks with HD-tune 2.55 and 3.50 pro but the maximum reading speeds do not exceed 96 mb/s and I always average out around 79mb/s

I have heard people complain about the high temps of these drives but I have yet to see them go over 30c

LaptopNomad

Most likely there are several HD103UJ firmware versions.
Mine is 1AA01118 production date June 2009.

SMART attribute spin-up time and temp are outside normalized spec, drivesitter keeps pulling the alarm. On top of that daily clicking. Had to switch down to SATA-1 to get it to work in a DELL SX280.

fearless_fool

FWIW, I purchased four HD103UJ in Dec 2008. They have worked flawlessly to date with no hard read errors, no sector reallocations, no problems.