Samsung's Spinpoint F1 hard drive
Three platters make a terabyte by Geoff Gasior — 11:32 AM on February 22, 2008
Manufacturer: Samsung
Model: Spinpoint F1 (1TB)
Price (Street): $259.99
Availability: Now
If asked to name a hard drive manufacturer, most folks are likely to point to Seagate or Western Digital. Some might even mention Hitachi or Maxtor, but Samsung? Probably not. Samsung's hard drives have seemingly been lost in the flurry of flat-screen televisions, cell phones, MP3 players, printers, and other products in the consumer electronics giant's portfolio. That's really a shame, because Samsung's latest Spinpoint F1 hard drive is quite an achievement.
The F1 is Samsung's first stab at the terabyte mark, and it comes to the party a little late. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 first broke the terabyte seal last year, and it was followed by Western Digital's Caviar GP and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11. However, what makes the F1 special isn't its terabyte capacity, but how Samsung has packed that much storage capacity into the drive. Hitachi achieves a terabyte using five 200GB platters. Seagate and Western Digital use four 250GB platters. Samsung needs only three platters, each of which packs a whopping 334GB.
By squeezing 33% more capacity per platter than its closest competitor, Samsung has bestowed upon the Spinpoint F1 a huge potential performance advantage over its rivals. The lower platter count should also help to lower the drive's power consumption and noise levels and even improve its reliability. This all sounds like a recipe for success, but how does it pan out in the real world? The folks at NCIX hooked us up with a Spinpoint F1 and we've tested it against two dozen other drives to find out, with enlightening results.
Conclusions
The fact that Samsung, a relatively small player in the hard drive market, is the first to offer a three-platter terabyte drive is an impressive feat in itself. But this is more than just a symbolic milestone. The Spinpoint F1 employs its three 334GB platters to provide incredible performance with low power consumption and noise levels.
The transfer rates this drive can sustain are staggering, and as we saw in our FC-Test results, it makes little difference whether you're throwing the drive a heaping helping of smaller files or just a few extremely large ones. Other terabyte drives—or even Raptors—are simply no match for the F1 if you're pushing files around. WorldBench performance is good, too, and the Spinpoint fared pretty well in our disk-intensive multitasking tests.
Perhaps more impressive than the F1's performance are its acoustics, which are surprisingly low. The drive is easily the quietest 7,200-RPM terabyte drive we've ever tested, and at idle, its noise levels are all but identical to those of Western Digital's near-silent GreenPower drives. Having only three platters to propel also helps the F1 achieve the lowest power consumption we've seen from a terabyte drive spinning at 7,200RPM.
Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB
February 2008If the Spinpoint has a weakness, it's the drive's performance under multi-user workloads simulated by our IOMeter testing. The F1 just doesn't scale well as the number of simultaneous I/O requests increases, ruling it out as a candidate for demanding server-class environments. However, this weakness does little to harm the drive's competency in desktop applications, its true mission in life.
The Spinpoint F1 1TB can currently be had for as little as $270 online, which is a fantastic price given the drive's blend of blistering performance with blissfully low noise levels. In fact, this drive is such a good value that we've given it our coveted Editor's Choice award. Samsung may not be the first name you associate with hard drives, but if you're shopping for a high-capacity storage upgrade, the Spinpoint F1 should be at the top of your list.
