Samsung F4 Firmware Update – Prevent Data Corruption

I have been getting lots of inquiries about how to upgrade the firmware of the Samsung F4 HD204UI 2Tb hard drive.

The major issue is the enhanced probability of data corruption (and data loss!).  There seems to be a flaw in the drive’s firmware where disk writes can become corrupted when the write cache is enabled.

Because of this, a firmware update was released by Samsung, and this updated firmware seems to be required for many of the older drives.

However, since Seagate recently acquired Samsung, the FAQ relating to this problem (http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386) is no longer available through Samsung.  Any attempt to access the Samsung domain will redirect to Seagate’s home page.  And, searching the Seagate site is futile and yields no useful information about this issue.

Fortunately, there is a functional download site to the F4EG firmware update.  Yes, it works!  I verified it several times now!

Hitachi Deskstar Desktop Hard Drive

This is a review of the Hitachi Deskstar 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive.  I have the 1TB and 2TB versions, but I will be reviewing the 1TB model here.

Basic specs are included in the product description. It is a 1TB 7200 rpm drive with 32 MB Cache. It comes in a retail packaging. The drive is in an anti-static bag, and suspended by plastic holders for protection during delivery and handling. It comes with 4 drive screws, and does not come with a SATA cable.

I purchased this drive when it went for $45 on one of those online deals (a price you won’t see for a while due to the recent flooding in Asia).  I need to increase the disk storage space for my workstation, so I am playing with a few different ones to see which ones suit my needs best.

What I need are disks for:

1. I need a drive for file storage; require immediate access to these files. I work with a lot of different file types, which include word processing, picture files (JPG, TIF, RAW), video files (SD, HD, mp4, VOB) for text, picture, and video editing.
2. I need a backup of this drive (manual backup) onto another drive (in the same computer); I run it almost like RAID1, but I manually backup these drives.
3. Automatic backup of this drive onto NAS box running RAID1.

This is a very quiet drive. I think this may be a different model than my other Hitachi drives, which are relatively louder than this one (I have to verify it later). It also runs relatively cool at 33 C during these testings, which means that it is less susceptible to heat damage from use over time (one of the primary causes of hard drive failure is overheating).

Firstly, as a single partition, this drive will come out as 931 GB. (You can skip this paragraph if you understand why a 1TB drive is now just over 900GB after installation.) This is due mainly to the ambiguity of the nomenclature. Briefly (and without going too much into the science), electronic memory circuits such as hard drives and memory chip sizes use a binary architecture, and this means that the number of addressable storage locations is based on the power of 2. Therefore, memory sizes are NOT integer multiples of 1000 (or 10^3), but of 1024. This magic number 1024 is based on 2^10 (read as “two to the power of 10,” which is equal to 1024), and because this is approximately 1000, the prefix symbol K (or kilo) was used for convenience. Bottom line is that this drive has 10^9 Bytes (or 1,000,000,000 Bytes, which can be termed as one “Giga” Byte), which is 977 x 10^6 KB, which is 954 x 10^3 MB, which is 931 GB. So if you were wondering where the 69 GB of data storage went, it got lost in the math of ambiguous nomenclature.

Bottom line is that this drive is cheap, fast, and quiet (for a 7200rpm drive). If you need to upgrade your desktop computer’s hard drive, I highly recommend this drive.

If you would like to see some benchmark results, read on (warning: geek alert):