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Samsung Spinpoint 32mb Cache F1 vs Seagate Barracuda 32mb Cache

M

Mr.PS

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jan 8, 2008
528
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Which one of these 500gb drives is better? I've been browsing Newegg for two hours now reading reviews. The Seagate drives seem to come with bad firmware that causes performance and cache recognition issues. The Samsung drives have a high failure rate.

Whats the real deal? Has anyone here had any bad experiences with either drives?

Seagate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148294

Samsung (yea it's a 750gb not 500gb):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152100
 
Mr.PS said:
Which one of these 500gb drives is better? I've been browsing Newegg for two hours now reading reviews. The Seagate drives seem to come with bad firmware that causes performance and cache recognition issues. The Samsung drives have a high failure rate.

Whats the real deal? Has anyone here had any bad experiences with either drives?

Seagate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148294

Samsung (yea it's a 750gb not 500gb):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152100
Click to expand...

You might want to consider Seagate ES.2, costs slightly more.
I ordered 5 x 1TB, will post my experience when I get them.
 
Anybody here had an F1 fail on them? (1TBs aside as everybody's seem to fail with some frequency still)
 
I've gone for 2 x 750GB Samsung F1's. Didn't look in to it that far to be honest, just heard good things about the F1's and went for it :eek:
 
I've heard nothing but good things about 750GB F1s everywhere. Quiet. Reliable. Very fast.

That has been my experience so far too.
 
I installed a Seagate 32 MB 1TB drive this morning. The drive is dead quiet.

So far I've only had Time Machine back up to it. I did manually copy one 1 100 MB file over to it and it was practically done as soon as I let go of the mouse button.

BTW, the screws to attach the drive are already attached to the drive tray for the early 2008 Mac Pro. The video I watched on OWC's site shows that you need to provide your own screws for the "older" Pros.
 
From what I've read, most of the Samsung failures are on Via and Promise SATA chipsets, and it's a drive to controller comminication issue rather than a real failure apparently. I've got 4 samsungs running in three different mac pros with no issues (2 2006/7 and 1 2008). Mac Pros use an Intel SATA chipset.
 
Looks like the spin points are no brainer. Raptors while nice are small, noisy, and a bit dated now, especially considering there performance gains are marginal. They do feel quite quick because of the lower seek times; I had two of them in raid 0 on my PC since early 2003. The lower number of platters seems awsome as well.

I'm going for 2 x 750gb 32mb cache seagate spin points in raid 0 for my main drive. :)

Does anyone have these bad boys in Raid yet?
 
The Samsung F1 500GB has only 16MB cache. The 32MB cache drives are the 750GB (HD753LJ) and 1TB (HD103UJ). I can't find them anywhere where I live!

I want to get 2 x 750GB F1 for my data, 1 x 320GB F1 (HD322HJ w/ 16MB) for OS X and Apps and the stock 320GB for Win bootcamp. ;)
 
I think that the impression being given by some that F1s are unreliable, at least using Mac-based Intel SATA chipsets, is wrong. I have found nothing online to back up the idea that any of us Mac users should be reluctant to use Samsungs, and again I ask if anyone here has bad experiences using them with an Intel-based Mac. I think they are actually some of the quietest, fastest and most reliable drives on the market, all at a pretty good price.
 
Cromulent said:
Except it is a SATA 150 drive and the Mac Pro uses SATA 300 so you've pretty much cut the speed on the drives interface in half.
Click to expand...

Do you recommend or know of any 500GB Sata 300 drives? Looking to buy a couple when my mac arrives.
 
I think I'm set on two Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gb's in software Raid 0.
 
Question from a Newbie:

-How do you fix a raid on HDs? And do you really have to?
 
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