[Newegg US] Korean Samsung HD204UI 2TB EcoGreen F4 + cool 3.5" case - $90 - YMMV

Link.

If you check the reviews a lot of owners have been receiving genuine Samsung not made by Seagate EcoGreen F4 2TB drives inside.
Ugotd8 was 5/5 with a different StoryStation.

Here's the $120 EcoGreen F4 2TB that's inside.

Excellent storage drive, RAID drive, or great for anyone who has an array already and is desperately seeking out more disks not made by Seagate.

That said, if you browse the reviews you'll notice that some features were turned off on these HD204UIs (AAM and NCQ), which can be fixed with a tool like HDDScan. All of them seem to be getting genuine Samsung drives, making these scarily underpriced European StoryStations the best storage drive available right now in terms of $/performance, $/reliability and $/GB.

Hope this helps!
Edited by claes - 7/14/12 at 11:01am

Hmmm that's not my understanding, but I am very curious as well. From what I've read the new Samsung by Seagate drives are not the same as older Samsung drives. The relabeling (Seagate Barracuda), the new model numbers (in this case ST2000DL004 vs HD204UI), being made in China rather than Korea, and a drastically reduced warranty would seem to indicate otherwise, but I haven't seen anything concrete. Newegg and Amazon reviews would seem to indicate this as well, with more DOAs and more failures, often within months, and the number of negative reviews drastically increasing. While Spinpoints were once 71% 5* drives on Newegg (about the best you can expect from a HDD) they are now down to 58% 5* reviews (use the last 6 months option), as with EcoGreens (68% to 52%). AFAIK the new drives are different and are as reliable as to be expected from their new namesake. While a lot of users, including on these forums, don't have any problems with their Seagate drives that has not been the case with me, as well as with many others, particularly in heavy R/W or 24/7 environments and RAID applications.

That said, these older drives are awesome and of the quality and consistency of older Samsung drives. In any case, $90 for a $120 2TB (assuming they are the same) is a great deal, right?

Edit: Just read that Seagate plans on discontinuing Samsung's 3.5" line, not sure what this means. People who RMA their Samsung drives seem to be getting Barracuda's back.
Edited by claes - 7/14/12 at 11:00am

Sorry, poor choice of words - it's not that they're lacking, it's that they're disabled. If you organize the reviews of the external drive in order of helpfulness you'll find reviewers comparing the drives inside to the OEM version - AAM appears to be set to "quiet" rather than "off" and NCQ is set to "off" rather than "on," but many reviewers were able to fix this.

Updated OP to reflect this and with link to bare drive.

I don't want to hash this out forever - maybe you love Seagate and have never had one fail, and that's great. Maybe you haven't and you're really skeptical about Seagate purchasing Samsung and eliminating Samsung's really nice line of 3.5" drives. Either way, a 2TB Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI, with it's stellar track record and excellent performance, IMO, is a steal at $90-$100, even when compared to shellshockers and every other really great $/GB deal I've seen since the flooding. Given that they're going for ~$100 when they're not on sale and that there are a million models with the same drive inside I don't see how this is anything but awesome deal for everyone.

Too long don't read:

That said, when my failure rate with Samsung went from ~8% to ~13-15% I started having my doubts. I do a lot of RAID setups for A/V environments and as such go through a lot of hard drives, often purchasing 10-20 at a time, which I'll concede is not an accurate representation of the quality of a hard drive, particularly given that they are often shipped in the same package and are only a handful of the thousands and thousands of drives produced, but it's not the worst starting point. Most of my experience is within the first few months of the drive's use-life as most of my customers are aware that hard drives fail and accept that a drive can fail a year or so later - they're not consumers like I am, just storing movies and music and whatever, they're in heavy R/W environments editing raw audio and video. I haven't purchased a new Samsung drive in three months, with my last batch of 20 having 2 DOA and 2 failing within two weeks.

It's not that I hate Seagate - I used to be pretty indiscriminate with manufacturers, making purchases based almost entirely on price point, and both Samsung and Seagate beat out other manufacturers in this regard for a long time without sacrificing too much in terms of performance and reliability. But in recent years Seagate's quality, in my experience, has gone way down hill (right around the time the 7200.11 drives came out). I tried the .12s and saw similarly high failure rates (20%-23%), and even found that the Constellation line was failing at a higher rate (increased by 3% for me, which is fine at ~10-11% but frustrating for an enterprise drive). So, of course every user's experience is different, and people are more likely to write a review if something breaks than if it works, but, in my experience, Seagate makes bad consumer hard drives now (though I still buy Constellations) and Samsungs by Seagate are significantly worse than Samsung made in Korea drives. I know a lot of users feel the same way, and it is a feeling, but I don't like the feeling of lost data, even if it is just that one Hidden Chord album I can't find anymore. Throw in their 3.5" line being at the end of it's life, the new model numbers, new place of manufacturer, RMAs receiving Barracuda drives, the new one year warranty... well, you won't even be able to buy Samsung drives soon anyway, so maybe you need a few to expand your array?

Edits: Had to check my files for numbers
Edited by claes - 7/14/12 at 1:44pm