Very pleased to see that the prices of these 2TB drives have fallen considerably over the past few months. The aggressive pricing from Samsung have brought the GB’s/$ more in line with their 1.5TB drives which offered better value in terms of costs. Today, that gap has dwindled down to a mere 0.55 cents difference. That is fantastic! Ok enough of the geeky excitement, let’s talk more about the two new Samsung HD203WI 2TB drives that I bought this afternoon. I found these to be the cheapest for the 2TB version which I purchased from PCMeal (Weird name I know!) in Homebush West and my from experience, I found the Samsung drives to be quietest and the coolest to run. My fileserver runs, two WD Caviar Green, three Seagate Barracuda’s and one Samsung HD103SJ drive.
Ok so let’s look at the important facts and figures about this drive before I get distracted. Here are the manufacturer specs listed on their website: Click Here if you want the full product specifications
EcoGreen F3
Capacity : 2 TB
Interface : Serial ATA 3.0 Gbps
Buffer Memory : 32 MB
Byte per Sector – 512 bytes
Rotational Speed – 5400 RPM
As you may have noticed, these drives have a rotational speed of 5400rpm which is slower the standard 7200rpm nowadays, that really doesn’t bother me because as these drives won’t be used for a database or an application server. It is strictly for storage.
Formatted Size
As you can see from the picture above Windows XP reads 1.81 TB capacity, the 1.5 drives reads 1.36 TB. I don’t really want to get started as to why there is different interpretations on how big a Gigabyte really is.
Benchmark
Using HD Tune to benchmark this drive, I got these results.
An average of 84 MB/s is nothing to be ashamed of and if you have a look at the temperature, I can tell you now that this did not budge from 24 degrees celsius. CPU usage at 4.2% on an Intel Dual Core machine.
Overall I’m very happy with this purchase and will be looking to put these in a FreeNas device that I’m planning to build in the next few days. Due to the failed EtrayZ venture, I think FreeNas is more appealing. Unfortunately the etrayz is a perfect example of you get what you pay for.