Daniel Roe
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Poster: Daniel Roe @ Fri May 27, 2011 1:54 pm
I buy a lot of hard drives. About a month ago I bought two 2tb Samsung (model not important). I put them in a RAID 1 because my spider sense told me one of them was going to fail. Sure enough, today one started making an obscene clicking noise as I was transferring the definitely-not-pirated 1080p versions of Hairy Pooper 1-7 there for long-term archiving. I determined which drive it was, unplugged it, and went on the Samsung site to get my RMA. [Incidentally, I also noted that the drives, both of which were bought from NewEgg, had consecutive serial numbers... FFFFFFUUUUUUUU]
All drives fail, especially big new ones. I bought the 2TB because I was running out of SATA ports (I have roughly 12 hard drives hooked up at any given time) and the price was right at ~$80 each.
Let me set down a basis for comparison here: a couple months ago I had to replace a 1TB Western Digital that was failing on me (sadface). I went on their site, typed in the serial, paid them $5 via credit card, printed out my shipping label, and headed to the UPS store. 10 minutes, including drive time. I also had the option of them just sending me a hard drive immediately while my broken one was in transit (they take a credit card number in case yours doesn't show).
For this Samsung drive, the process was similar apart from they don't offer a loaner drive and no shipping label. This is going to cause me to pay more and lose my drive for a longer period of time. Good thing I don't need something unimportant like say, a hard drive any time soon!
I bet you were expecting an actual review of the features and speed of these mega HDs, I'd say I'm sorry to disappoint, but the reality is: they're big, they're unreliable, and they're not quick at all. The real differences you should look at are price, unmanageable design flaws, and RMA process, since you'll definitely be using it. As far as RMAs go, Samsung is the loser here.
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