Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI

This could be the last ever Samsung HDD we test here at DigitalVersus, as since Samsung's hard drive division was bought by Seagate, Samsung-branded hard drives could soon be a thing of the past. So should this EcoGreen F4 HD204UI HDD be confined to the realms of history without second thought, or should you be out there snapping up every last model before it's too late? Answers below.

This 3.5-inch (desktop PC format) hard drive has a 6 Gbps SATA-3 interface which should mean that large files can be transferred pretty quickly. The spin speed is limited to 5400 rpm, which could hinder performance with other types of file. However, this limit is easily explained by the fact that the HD204UI is part of Samsung's EcoGreen range, designed to keep power consumption and operating temperatures to a minimum. Finally, the 32 MB cache memory is pretty standard for this type of HDD. Note that high-performance drives often have a 64 MB cache and some SSDs pack in a huge 128 MB cache.

Remember that unlike the hard drive's overall score, its rating  in this section is based on a comparison been all the drives we've ever tested, including SSDs. This can help explain surprisingly low scores.
As expected, this drive performs very well with large files. In fact, in this field, it isn't far behind the best drives currently on the market. However, with smaller files the read and write speeds come crashing down to just under average compared with all the other drives we've tested:
 

CrystalDiskMark 3.0 x64 for 4 GB

We then used the AS-SSD test to see whether the results confirm the findings above:
 

  AS SSD test

It's not often that we see these two tests throw out such different results, but the write speeds for large files came out slower than in the previous test. In fact, we think this is the first time we've seen a drive get different results in these two tests. There are more surprises in store too ...

Access times are nothing special, but we weren't expecting anything more from a 5400 rpm drive. Only 7200 rpm or 10000 rpm drives can do better, and for the very best access times, you'll need to look to SSDs.
 

Access time measured with AS SSD

The second nasty surprise with this hard drive is its score in the PCMark Vantage benchmark test, which is the worst score we've ever seen in the two years we've been testing HDDs. Although these scores are not completely catastrophic, they still lag behind the rest of the competition:
 

PCMark Vantage benchmark test

This fairly mediocre performance was further confirmed in our purely practical tests:
 

Installation/loading time (mins and sec)