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Samsung HD103UJ Terabyte Drive

Posted 04/11/08 at 11:51:45 AM  by David Murphy

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Performance scores are one thing, but we’re equally impressed by Samsung’s technical accomplishment in achieving the highest areal density to date on its new series of Spinpoint F1 drives. And at the top of the heap sits the HD103UJ, the company’s long-awaited drive that reaches an areal density of an astonishing 334GB per platter.

That’s right. The HD103UJ sports a three-platter array, much to the likely embarrassment of its competitors in the high-capacity storage arena. Hitachi’s first-to-the-market 7K1000 drive has five platters, while terabyte offerings from Western Digital and Seagate split the difference at four. What’s the benefit of this increased areal density? In a word: speed.

Samsung’s drive destroys all other terabyte models in many of the mission-critical benchmarks we run, including tests for average reads, writes, and real-world performance. HD Tach’s synthetic tests show the drive achieving read speeds of nearly 100MB/s, with write speeds swimming along at 84.4MB/s. On the real-world side, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 cruised to victory in three of our five PCMark05 tests: an XP startup simulation, application loading, and general use, but the HD103UJ’s excellent write capabilities—it’s 14MB/s faster than the Deskstar, as reported by HD Tach—helped it overtake the Deskstar by almost 300 points on the overall score.

The HD103UJ produced the slowest random access times of the three compared drives, but the effects of this and the drive’s slower burst speeds were never apparent during our real-world tests. Hands-down, this is the fastest terabyte drive we have tested.

Click to Enlarge

Nestled inside this 3.5-inch drive is a masterwork of areal density that sports a whopping 32MB cache.

Samsung HD103UJ
www.samsung.com
plus
Pete Tong

Highest areal density ever = Fastest terabyte drive ever.

minus
So Long

Slower random-access times, but not so you'd notice.

Benchmarks
  Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 Seagate 7200.11 Samsung HD103UJ
HD Tach Burst (MB/s) 205.8 195.5 204.5
HD Tach Rdm Access (ms) 12.8 12.6 13.7
HD Tach Avg Read (MB/s) 72.7 91.4 96.8
HD Tach Avg Write (MB/s) 70.1 79.7 84.4
PCMark05 Overall 7,764 7,323 8,014
Best scores are bolded. All benchmarks taken using HD Tach 3.0.1.0
COMMENTS:6
TAGS: samsung, Review, Hard Drive, hardware, terabyte drive, kickass, areal density, Samsung HD103UJ, build a pc
COMMENTS
avatarUnreliable disk

Submitted by laptopnomad on Thu, 08/06/2009 - 9:42am

 

Bought 3 with production date june 2009. 2 failed on me in the first 2 weeks. These drives have multiple issues. SATA compatibility, high temperatures, spin-up time fluctuations and mysterious writes to the partition table.Unreliable disk, don't buy!

Ciao,

LaptopNomad
-----------------------------------
http://www.laptop-junction.com

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avatarUnreliable Drive

Submitted by nickmo on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 4:13pm

I, too, trusted your BotB recommendation and picked up two of these drives from NewEgg, ignoring the low user rating.  About six weeks after installing them, one has gone bad, consistently throwing IO errors and locking up my whole machine for 5-25 seconds at a time. The worst part is that i'm outside NewEgg's return window, and Samsung says that if their ES-Tool diagnostic software doesn't detect a failure they won't RMA the drive. Of course ES-Tool says the drive is fine, and even if I could return it Samsung would only give me a refurbished drive in exchange.  That stinks.

 

 

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avatarSeagate 1.5 TB in the running?

Submitted by mysteriousgamer on Wed, 10/08/2008 - 6:40pm

Your comparison of the Seagate 7200.11 is a bit vague.  Which one was used in the comparison?  I'm curious if the new 1.5 TB Barracuda stacks up to these drives.  Also, how about adding a best of the best SSD HDD categoy.  That'd be awesome!

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avatarFailure rate of drives

Submitted by runner7775 on Fri, 09/05/2008 - 1:30pm

I hate to say it but I got one of these drives from Newegg igoring
the low score on Newegg's ratings list.  I trusted the BOTB listing(not
to say I don't still trust you guys).  I hadn't used it much until a
few days ago but in both XP and Vista and it continually askd me to
reformat because its not formatted.  I don't know but I going to trade
it out for a WD drive.   It's fair to say that MaximumPC is going to
have to respond to the reported high failure rate(to see what their
long term experience with this drive is).

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avatarM.V.P. or P.O.S.

Submitted by Mayhemm on Fri, 04/18/2008 - 8:36pm

I know these things are fast, but have you heard about the supposed high rate of failure and data loss with them?

Did that factor into the review at all, or would you give it a lower score now?

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avatarBest of the Best

Submitted by icebird on Thu, 08/28/2008 - 8:24am

If this drive is going to be on the BOTB list, I think Mayhemm's question deserves a response.  1TB of storage is usless if the device is prone to failure.

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