Quote:
| Samsung squeezed 334GB onto each of the F1's three platters. What takes 37 hours to format but sips power and moves faster than spit on a hot griddle? The answer is Samsung's 1TB Spinpoint F1 Series hard drive. Rather than go with the flow and use four or more platters to contain its 1TB as most drive manufacturers would do, Samsung took a long cut and squeezed 334GB onto each of the F1's three platters. The obvious benefit is that there's slightly less of everything: power consumption, noise, vibration and the like. With fewer parts, the statistical failure rate drops accordingly, and Samsung has added staggered spin-up technology, device-controlled power management, and noise suppression of its own devising. It's a nice package and it is a quiet drive. |
Quote:
| Despite the affect on the formatting speed of the drive, the data handling speed remained the same pre- and postpatch. In fact, the Spinpoint F1 ran through HD Tach with the fastest results of the four 1TB drives tested so far: 205.8MB/sec. burst speed and 95.9MB/sec. average read. Why? That's the upside to having more data moving under the read/write head in the same period of time relative to a drive with a lower areal density. On the power front, the F1 uses just a half-watt more during average operations than Western Digital's RE2GP "Green" drive -- although it does gobble up 3.7 additional watts at idle than the RE2GP. What it all boils down to is that if you're running a desktop system with occasional drive access and you're worried about the planet, go Western Digital. However, if you have a server (or even a desktop system) that sees a lot drive access, a 7% higher power draw is easily acceptable in exchange for 11% to 12% faster access. |
