Should I get Spinpoint F4 HD204UI?

Zenthar

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Hi, I've been considering buying a larger storage HDD for a while and now I see the Samsung Spinpoint F4 HD204UI for 90$CAD+15% cashback using PayPal and free shipping which seems like a good deal to me.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bits and I already have an OCZ Solid 2 Series OCZSSD2 (60GB) as my OS drive, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST3500320AS (500GB) as my Software/Storage drive and an old Western Digital Caviar RE WD2500YD (250GB) I use mostly for temporary work (DVD RIP, unzipping large archives before burning them to disks, backups, ...).

I know it uses the new 4K sectors and I have to flash the FW with the latest one from Samsung to prevent corruption, but beside that, would anyone see any reason NOT to buy this drive? Would the 4K thing cause any issue with Windows 7, is there anything special I should do or be worried about?

Thanks all for any comment/suggestions.
 
Solution
4K sector won't be an issue if you use it in Windows 7 for normal storage. Just make sure to create the partitions inside Windows and not using some third party program like cloning applications, which often give you a badly aligned partition.

The 4K sector drives means you have bigger ECC pool and thus can correct bad sectors more easily than those HDDs without. This makes them ideal backup drives and other tasks which require data security.

It's also one of the fastest disks today; beating even the 10.000rpm older 300GB velociraptor family.

sub mesa

Distinguished
4K sector won't be an issue if you use it in Windows 7 for normal storage. Just make sure to create the partitions inside Windows and not using some third party program like cloning applications, which often give you a badly aligned partition.

The 4K sector drives means you have bigger ECC pool and thus can correct bad sectors more easily than those HDDs without. This makes them ideal backup drives and other tasks which require data security.

It's also one of the fastest disks today; beating even the 10.000rpm older 300GB velociraptor family.
 
Solution
G

Guest

Guest
I installed the samsung f4 in my new system, i5-2500k P67 Win 7 64bit, and windows doesnot recognise the 4k sector it shows it as 512byte. Samsung doesnot seem to have an update driver so i can not change the sector size seriously inhibiting performance, so my advice is not to buy this drive.