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Performance scores are one thing, but we are equally impressed by Samsung’s technical accomplishment in achieving the highest areal density to date on its new series of SpinPoint F1 drives. And at the top of the heap sits the SpinPoint F1, the company’s long-awaited drive that reaches an areal density of an astonishing 334GB per platter.
That’s right. The Samsung SpinPoint F1 sports a three-platter array, much to the likely embarrassment of its competitors in the high-capacity storage arena. Hitachi’s first-to-the-market 7K1000 drive has five platters, while terabyte offerings from Western Digital and Seagate split the difference at four. What is the benefits of this increased areal density? In a word: speed.
Samsung’s drive destroys all other terabyte models in many of the mission critical benchmarks we run,
including tests for average reads, writes, and real-world performance. HD Tach’s synthetic tests show the drive achieving read speeds of nearly 100MB/s, with write speeds swimming along at 84.4MB/s. On the real-world side, Hitachi’s Deskstar 7K1000 cruised to victory in three of our fi e PCMark05 tests: an XP startup simulation, application loading, and general use, but the HD103UJ’s excellent write capabilities, it’s 14MB/s faster than the Deskstar, as reported by HD Tach that helped it overtake the Deskstar by almost 300 points on the overall score.
The Samsung SpinPoint F1 produced the slowest random access times of the three compared drives, but the effects of this and the drive’s slower burst speeds were never apparent during our real-world tests. Hands-down, this is the fastest terabyte drive we have tested.
Click for more: Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ – Hard drive – 1 TB – internal – 3.5\” – SATA-300 – 7200 rpm – buffer: 32 MB
Tags: hard disk