Introduction

Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD203WI -- 2 Terabyte HDD storage at the lowest price

So I was building a new NAS storage unit shortly ago for the office with the main reason to really increase storage volume for cloned drive backups. When I started browsing on the web to see what 1 TB, 1.5 TB and 2 TB HDDs cost these days, I was a little shocked. If you go high in volume and can forfeit on performance a little, you can purchase a GB for 6 cents (EUR) these days. So browsing onwards I stumbled into the Samsung HD203WI HDD drives, these puppies hold 2 TB of data and where on sale at only 117 EUR / 149 USD.

The downside, these drives have a rotational speed of just 5400 RPM, but considering this is a storage unit for mass amounts of data that are hardly accessed, we figured to take the gamble and so ordered four of them to place inside that NAS unit. That's 8TB of storage 468 EUR, a very good deal.

So today we'll take one of these drives and check it out to see where the 5400 RPM Samsung-HD203WI is in terms of performance and noise, which will be a good pointer to see where drives like these are ranked for storage anno 2010.

See we feel that the best solution for any PC is currently one SSD for all the operating system functions, hardcore applications like Photoshop and games. Then sitting next to it should be a high-storage HDD for 'slow' and low-priority data like MP3s, movies, documents, photo's etc etc. That right now is the golden combo for any PC to gain the best performance, yet optimize your storage volume.

Have a peek at the Samsung-HD203WI, a Sata2 HDD with 2TB storage and a whole lotta value for money ... but does it perform at the very least reasonably ? Let's find out ...