It could be said that the most important component in any Windows Home Server, or desktop computer for that matter, is the hard drive. The hard drive is what WHS uses to store all of your data and the more hard drives you have, the more storage you have available.
Samsung have released a new set of hard drives called the F2 Series EcoGreen hard drives. They come in either 500GB, 1TB or 1.5TB variants – and all of them are SATA drives. For this review I am looking at a 500GB model.
Samsung’s new eco-friendly hard drive utilises its low noise operation technology SilentSeek and NoiseGuard to achieve a quiet operation system. A reinforced flying on demand (FOD) technology controls the distance between the disk and the head, a safety measure to protect the head and raise the stability of data stored on the disk.
So, what does that actually all mean?
SilentSeek and NoiseGuard is the name of the technology that Samsung use to to minimize the mechanical excitation generated by any resonance, virtually eliminating the source of seek acoustic noise. So basically, in simple terms, it means that the drive is quiet during operations such as read and write. Very quiet!
The “Green” drive lowers the amount of power required to run it, hence the “green” status. So if you are trying to reduce your spending on electricity, or you just want to do you bit to protect the environment, then going green won’t compromise your needs. Samsung claim that the drive consumes 43% less power in read/write and 57% less in idle than competitor’s 7200rpm drives. Which is quite a statement to make.
Adding the drive to my Windows Home Server was as simple as you would expect. The only disappointment was that out of the 500GB on the drive, Windows Home Server would only “see” 466GB, but I think we are also used to not quite getting the amount of hard disk space advertised with ANY hard drive, so it’s not really a failing just on this drive, or on Windows Home Server.
Overall I am very impressed with this drive. It is very quiet and the temperature was a good 15 degrees lower than the Seagate drive I also had in my test Windows Home Server. And even though the drive is only 5400 rpm, it still appears to be very fast. Samsung state that it actually performs at current 7200 rpm drive speeds, and to be honest, I can believe it. I can’t wait to get my hands on the 1.5 TB variant.
The 500GB variant I tested can be purchased for less than £50 in the UK, and even cheaper if you look hard enough.
This is a very good, low cost addition to any system, and I will be using it when I build my next Windows Home Server in order to keep the costs down.
Well done Samsung, you have a new fan!
FEATURES
• Formatted capacity : 500GB
• Environment friendly product with RoHS compliance
• Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps Interface Support
• Improved performance with dual-ARM based firmware
• Improved recording stability over temperature with PMR
• ATA S.M.A.R.T. Compliant
• Advanced dynamic FOD control for best data integrity
• ATA Automatic Acoustic Management Feature
• Intelligent compensation of external disturbance
• ATA 48-bit Address Feature
• SATA Native Command Queuing Feature
• ATA Device Configuration Overlay Feature
• Device Initiated SATA Power Management
• NoiseGuard
• Rotational vibration sensor
• SilentSeek
Technical Details:
| Product Description | Samsung SpinPoint F2EG Desktop Class HD502HI – hard drive – 500 GB – SATA-300 |
| Type | Hard drive – internal |
| Form Factor | 3.5″ x 1/3H |
| Dimensions (w x d x h) | 10.2 cm x 14.6 cm x 2.5 cm |
| Weight | 450 g |
| Capacity | 500 GB |
| Interface Type | Serial ATA-300 |
| Data Transfer Rate | 300 MBps |
| Average Seek Time | 8.9 ms |
| Spindle Speed | 5400 rpm |
| Buffer Size | 16 MB |
Could you post the temperature, power consumption and your test speeds?
The difference in hd size is because the manufacturers and Windows does not use the same definition of GB.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
U should try reformat the disk, since it has 2x 334 GB plates.
U should get the 500 gb or something close.
Japitaki, You are a noob!
Marketing person(s) are very clever bunch!!
The MP said it is 500Gb just to make it attractive to us (they just put a disclaimer saying 1Mb = 1,000,000bytes)…
While the actual 1Mb = 1024Kb……..
And the MP are doing this for years!!
Go figure!!