Samsung Spinpoint F4EG HD204UI 2TB compatibility?

[M.Beier]

But i was curious about the 4k sector problem? What is this exactly? Is it also a problem for the samsung HD or only the WD disks?
How can I know that there is a problem and how can i solve it?

Do I need to format the new HD before I use it the first time? This is my first NAS so I don't know that this is necessary?

You should be fine if you use the latest installer software according to this post and many more:
viewtopic.php?f=26&t=24227#p109904

Did not work for me, and exactly same issue... It says 512 bytes....
However, I do have the 256 in beginning as well, as others say, if its there instead of 63, then thumbs up...

[AxelS]

Did not work for me, and exactly same issue... It says 512 bytes....
However, I do have the 256 in beginning as well, as others say, if its there instead of 63, then thumbs up...

I think it's fine. It says 512 bytes per sector even on some 4K drive. This is because old OSes will not work unless the drive reports 512 bytes per sector. This is the whole issue. A new OS has to know that the drive is actually a 4K drive even though it publicly reports 512. Synology seems to do this fine.

[pnc]

I have found what appears to be a good offer on a new Synology DS210J 2-bay NAS server DLNA SATA USB with 2 x Samsung 2TB SpinPoint EcoGreen F4EG SATA3 32MB Hard Drive. Will this setup work (raid 0 or 1) ?
Although, a secondary issue, I am also interested in DLNA and would welcome feedback from any user.
Thanks

[tcassio]

I installed 4 of these drives in a DS410 running DSM 3.0 1340 on Fri 10/22. It took about 10 hours to format the drives. No errors. So far everything is working just fine. The drives run at (about) 88 degrees F. The only thing that I noticed was that drive 4 (closest to the mother board) runs about 6 degrees hotter than drive 1 (the one on top).

[bouncemeister]

So if i buy a Samsung 2TB HD204UI and install it after i update my DS-207 to the latest version, everything should work ok?
I am running version DSM 2.2-0948 now.

[frold]

I can confirm HD204UI is working on DS209 I got two on raid 1

eg did run for 2 days while updating/indexing photo station - max temp 37 celcious

The only cons is the spin up noise...

[AxelS]

FYI, I just added a fourth HD204UI 2TB to my RAID5 in a 1010+ and everything is working fine. I hotswapped the drive in and it was recognized instantly. The volume expansion took about 32 hours but that seems normal.

Cheers,
Mattias

[tarumaycry]

FYI, I just added a fourth HD204UI 2TB to my RAID5 in a 1010+ and everything is working fine. I hotswapped the drive in and it was recognized instantly. The volume expansion took about 32 hours but that seems normal.

Cheers,
Mattias

Hey Mattias, you mentioned in your earlier post you were getting 20MB/sec. Has there been any improvements to the transmission/throughput via the network?

[mikesz81]

Hi there,
I'm thinking about buying Synology Disk Station DS410j and want to run it with 2xSamsung F4 EcoGreen 2TB. Can anyone confirm that these drives are compatible and will work?

Any comments welcome.

Mikesz81

Cheers

Edit: Merged Topic

[AxelS]

FYI, I just added a fourth HD204UI 2TB to my RAID5 in a 1010+ and everything is working fine. I hotswapped the drive in and it was recognized instantly. The volume expansion took about 32 hours but that seems normal.

Cheers,
Mattias

Hey Mattias, you mentioned in your earlier post you were getting 20MB/sec. Has there been any improvements to the transmission/throughput via the network?

Yes. It must have been something with the Sync software that slowed it down or maybe the CS407e. Copying 20GB+ of data to the device using normal Windows copy over a single gigabit line showed around 70-80MB/sec.

Cheers,
Mattias

[wiinis]

I installed 4 of these drives in a DS410 running DSM 3.0 1340 on Fri 10/22. It took about 10 hours to format the drives. No errors. So far everything is working just fine. The drives run at (about) 88 degrees F. The only thing that I noticed was that drive 4 (closest to the mother board) runs about 6 degrees hotter than drive 1 (the one on top).

Exactly the same setup here.. running for about 2 weeks no problems.

Cheers

[lefty]

I'm 5 days in on my new 1010 and no problems to report with the Spinpoint F4 2TB's.

Running 5 F4's in a Raid-5 configuration. Performance is excellent; I copied over a few TB's of movies from different sources and achieved a blistering 110-120MB/sec aggregate transfer w/ link aggregation. Damn, I love this product!

Well done, Synology engineers.

[tcassio]

These drives are on sale at Newegg now for only $79 with eblast promo code. This is a great deal.

[snielsen]

Has anyone any info on whether these drives park heads as often as the WD EARS ones (unless one runs the WD Idle tool on them)? If so, does the ES-Tool from Samsung allow one to change the period between parks (load/unload cycle)?

[gdtrfb55]

Hi. I'm a new Syno user, and new to the forums.

My rig is a 410j, populated with 4 of the Samsung Spinpoint HD204UI 2TB drives. Using the version of SynologyAssistant (2.3-1157) that came with the NAS, I tested and formatted the drives, and created a single 5.36 TB RAID 5 volume. The box is running under DSM 3.0-1354. I fired up the array a week ago, and have loaded ~1.9 TB of data onto it, all without incident.

I am, however, somewhat concerned about the performance of the unit. While trying to determine possible bottlenecks in the configuration, I became aware of the potential issues with 4K-sector drives (like the Spinpoints I have installed). In order to rule out bad sector alignment as a performance problem, can anybody verify that my drives are properly sector-aligned? I believe they are, but this is my first experience with this type of drive and I'd like another opinion.

This is the output from fdisk, edited to show only the partitioning on the first drive. All four drives are identically partitioned.

Code: Select all

NAS> fdisk -lu

Disk /dev/sda: 2000.3 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders, total 3907029168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks  Id System
/dev/sda1             256     4980735     2490240  fd Linux raid autodetect
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary
/dev/sda2         4980736     9175039     2097152  fd Linux raid autodetect
Partition 2 does not end on cylinder boundary
/dev/sda3         9437184  3907024064  1948793440+ fd Linux raid autodetect


I believe the partitions are correctly sector-aligned because (a) the starting sector for each partition is divisible by 8, and (b) the size of each partition (in sectors) is divisible by 8. And, based on my research, 8 is the magic number, because 8 x 512 = 4K.

Can anyone verify that my drives are correctly sector-aligned? If you need any additional information, please let me know.

Thanks in advance.