Averageman

I recently purchased a brand new hard drive, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB HD103UJ.
I bought this drive because I kept hearing that it was a relatively fast drive, saw a lot of HD-tune screenshots floating around as well. Well I just got mine and decided to bench it.

Do these speeds look okay? Most of the other hd-tune screenshots I've seen of this drive boast over 90mb/s average transfer speed. Mine is lower but the burst speed looks good.
I was planning to maybe move my OS from my 500gb F1 HD502IJ because the reviews kept saying the 103UJ was a faster drive. After having benched them both they're about the same for me.

I had another question about UDMA modes as well, as HD-tune is saying both my drives are running in UDMA 5. But after doing a search for "UDMA" on this forum it seems it doesn't seem to matter much. And after checking the Bios of my Asus P5Q motherboard it seems I can't set the drives beyond UDMA 5 anyway. (Sata controller set to "enchanced" and "IDE" atm, with AHCI and RAID as alternative options.)

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Riou

I get this result on my old Seagate 7200.11 1TB drive:

savagebunny

Here is mine HD103UJ

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Riou

You might get higher performance if you change to AHCI. Install the Intel Matrix Storage Manager before you switch to AHCI or you will get a BSOD.

Averageman

Aye might try that, though I've heard AHCI offers little performance benefit for desktop systems, in some cases even a penalty.

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eflyguy

http://expertester.wordpress.com/200...ark-advantage/
..a

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Old Hippie

'Tis true but as you can see in eflyguy's link, most of the time it helps.

That link is a year old but I have no doubt that the newer controllers and HDs are more AHCI compatable and can take better advantage of it's capabilities.

Since you're running XP, enabling AHCI is going to be more involved than just installing the Storage Manager.

I wouldn't expect any major increases but if you're looking for every last bit of performance it will help.

Basically, there's no reason not to try it.

BTW, burst speed means little to nothing in the real world and depends upon the cache of your drive.

Averageman

Well I made the switch to AHCI, took a little doing.
Had to slipstream the AHCI drivers into my copy of windows XP Sp3 but it worked flawlessly.

Nothing has changed however, my benchmarks are still identical to before, if not a little worse.
Why is my HD103UJ not performing as well as it should?

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Old Hippie

Looks like that's all you're gonna get.

I have had an experience with slower speeds in AHCI but it was awhile back and disabling NCQ actually helped. IDK if you have the option to disable NCQ on your chipset but it's worth a shot.

The only other thing I can suggest is to make sure you have the policies in the device manager set to enable write caching and advanced performance for the drive.

Averageman

I'll look into it, thanks.

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