Customer Reviews

Samsung 1 TB Spinpoint 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.5 inch Bulk/OEM Desktop Hard Drive HD103SI

5 star:		(66)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

This is my fifth Samsung 1tb drive. They are by far the best in this size and class. I am using them exclusively in my custom build computers. I highly recommend this drive to anyone needing a fast, quite, and reliable drive.

However, you will want to get it elsewhere. What the hell is going on with Amazon and the shipping department!!! After reading the emails about their packaging I thought that Amazon would correct this. HELL NO!!! I just received the drive today. I cannot believe how the drive was packed. It was in a box alone with no, I repeat, no packaging at all. The drive was in the OEM plastic clam-shell container with nothing around it. This thing was slip-sliding around in the box for the past few days!! I am afraid to install it. This is ridiculous! This is not what I would expect from Amazon. I was forewarned by all the feedback. Unfortunately I did not heed the warnings hoping that mighty Amazon would do better. Well it did not happen. This is insane!! Shame on you Amazon. I will return the drive at their cost and go to Newegg. They know how to ship drives and delicate electronics.

UPDATE: NOT AGAIN!!!! After calling customer support to express my dissatisfaction with the way they shipped the last hard drive (which I returned) they said they would send a new one but ensure that it was shipped correctly. NOT!!! The replacement was shipped the exact same way. What is the problem here?! This one is going back again. This time I will take a refund and pass on getting hard drives from Amazon.

Ok so I was hoping that some of the previous reviews of terrible packaging were untrue but they are true. I received this drive in a small thin box, inside there was NO packing material at all. None, Nada... Wow. The plastic casing that the drive comes in was open, and the drive was just flopping away inside the box all the way to my house. How can a huge company like Amazon not understand how bad this is? This is not a book, its a harddrive, this kind of movement destroys drives. I requested a replacement and we will see how that goes. Amazon is going downhill it would seem earlier this week I ordered another item and it never made it into the mail, they assigned a tracking number but the shipper never received it. Now this. I am quickly losing faith in Amazon. At least the customer service is good, but the shipping is the worst it has ever been.

Update: I just received a replacement harddrive and I received a drive in the same condition. Very frustrating. This one came in a bigger box, the clam shell with the drive placed in the box with 4 airbags on top. So there was padding on one side but not the other. UPS shipped my drive from Nevada to Kentucky then back to California, so the drive took quite a ride and the whole time with padding on just one side. I emailed Amazon and asked why the drive was not wrapped in bubble wrap. Is this so hard? Why are some drives being packaged correctly and others just dropped into a box and shipped? Since this is a replacement, and I told them exactly why I was returning this, it is totally unacceptable. They should have been notes placed on the replacement order to the shipping dept that they need to wrap the drive correctly, obviously there were no notes.

I should have listened. As of 9/2/2010 Amazon has still failed to figure out how to package a delicate electronic device. If you order this here, you deserve the failed hard drive you will inevitably get. Mine lasted THREE DAYS before windows seven told me the disk was failing.

Fast, quiet, made by Samsung. What more could you want? Got this for my first ever build, everything installed perfectly and FAST. I have yet to hear a single noise from this HD, and my fans are not noisy. Love it. Shipping by Amazon was good - it came as part of a larger order and was in its own separate smaller box inside the bigger box of the rest of the order. It had bubble/air wrap wrapped several times around the drive, and the drive itself was packed inside a plastic clamshell that seems to be Samsung standard now. Very nice, no worries about shipping from my experience. :) When you format the drive, you get about 930 GB of usable space, but that's to be expected, so I am very happy with my drive. :)

Samsung F3 is a great disk drive. It is one of the fastest and quietest hard drives. However Amazon.com packaging is awful. Let's me repeat. It is awful and horrible and I would not buy a hard drive from Amazon.com again. It came with no bubble-wrap - just a clear plastic cover. And the box was filled with one air-pocket. The drive was lying flat on the bottom of the box. It does not take a rocket-scientist to figure out that UPS & no proper protective package will do to a delicate HD.

I have ordered many hard drives, including Amazon.com. I ordered WD Green drives earlier this year from Amazon. WD came in its own separate box - tightly packaged - two plastic inserts at each end of HD to make sure it won't move and protected. Another popular store - n.w. - is not much better - it is hit or miss there too. I used to order z.z.f because they put HD inside of a fitted styrofoam box. Then the stryfom is placed inside a larger box with peanuts. I gambled b/c the price was good and I have 'prime' shipping.

Do not gamble. It is not worth copying all the files and see it fail in a couple of days.

This is one of the fastest, best performing hard drives out there. It is also extremely quiet. The WD Black Caviar is also a great choice (and also pretty much silent), but the Samsung F3 performs a bit better.

Amazon, however, packaged the drive in the plastic cover shown in one of the pictures, but with just airpacks..which arrived completely blown up because of the jarring during shipment. The drive of course is causing BSODs now and HDTune shows transfer rates as low as 2.3 (usually over 60).

I'm returning it to amazon and ordering it from a place that packages their drives with the care these extremely fragile items need.

I will try to upload a picture of the packaging and HDtune result from the damaged drive.

While the product itself gets rave reviews, it was shipped in a manner that easily can damage the product. This order shows that high tech items shipped from amazon are a gamble and often not worth the small savings.

First of all this is a great hard drive - BUT I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW THEY SHIPPED IT!

The hard drive was in a clear plastic "blister" type package, and it was laying in the bottom of a box with a couple of other items. Sure enough, after just a couple of days of use, I started to make a drive image with Acronis 2010 and it failed. I then downloaded and ran the Samsung Hard Drive utility and it showed a number of disk errors. Surprise, Surprise. Note, I was really surprised that Samsung does not have a utility that you can run in windows like Western Digital has - The Samsung utility has to be burned to a CD and then ran in DOS - a real pain, and I don't think I would buy another Samsung drive because of this

I found a replacement drive from eWiz, it was about $10 cheaper and it came in a small cardboard box. The hard drive was in the same "blister" type package, but eWiz had fitted some foam caps over each end so the drive was suspended in the middle of the box. That is how a Hard Drive should be shipped

Shame on you Amazon

I don't know for sure if I can blame the death after four hours of my new drive on the crappy Amazon packaging, but... well, it was crappy Amazon packaging, in the clamshell with only one layer of bubble wrap around it. After reading reviews here and elsewhere about dead drives that came in lousy packaging, the second I saw the box I was nervous. Drive installed fine. Windows 7 installed fine. Began transferring files over from my old hard drive and all of a sudden the computer started rebooting randomly. After some research we chalked it up to the antivirus, disabled it, and were able to continue. Then, more random reboots. Began to despair that the power supply was at fault...

and then we heard it.

CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

Yep. Read/write errors and bad sectors and loud clicking, oh my! OEM drives with this high capacity have high failure rates across the board, all manufacturers and sellers, if you look around, but nobody seems to be sure whether it's packaging issues or manufacturing failures. Either way, I'm now very very nervous about replacing this drive and trying again. Fingers crossed, but I may give up and buy a retail kit for more money. Be careful with these bare drives!

Title says it all.

Amazon states they come with a 3 year warranty. When you enter the serial number into Samsung's Hard Drive Warranty checker it comes back with a 101 code meaning absolutely 0 warranty support from Samsung. I ordered 2 and they were both the flagged like that.

From the reviews here it looks like I am the only person who actually bothered to check if their warranty was valid 0.o

They came well packaged if it is any consolation.........