Does anyone have any experience with the new Spinpoint F series hard drives from Samsung?
It was launched in July and should have the highest platter density to date: 334GB per platter. Any thoughts on it's performance?

If you want to call it a launch, it was a soft launch. I would say they were annouced in July. I have been egarly anticipating some reviews, but have not yet seen any.

well, just taking platter density and rpms into consideration, but not so much cache, as im not sure how much difference going from 16 to 32MB even makes... if you compare it to a few other hdds from western digital and hitachi, you might be able to get a rough estimate of its performance

the 1TB hitachi has 200GB platters, and an outer platter STR of about 85MB/s

750GB from western digital has 250GB platters, outer platter STR of about 95MB/s

so a 334GB platter hdd 'should' have outer platter STRs of at least 110MB/s

as far as application performance, the platters are dense enough now at 7200rpms, to where even 10k raptors with their 74GB platters should finally be outperformed or at least matched for desktop performance. up till now they havent been, but we may finally see a turning point on the desktop.

8ms access times certainly help when it comes to applications in general... but when the density is great enough, even that ~14ms access time seems fast, especially when a higher density is contained to a smaller area by way of partitioning (which then keeps seek times and fragmentation to a minimum, and performance optimal as a result)... though the same can be said for any hdd too actually.

The major selling point of the raptors is the seek time, 7200rpm is not going to be able to match 10k on random access time.

I would like to see a Raptor with PMR, SATA-II and a higher density disk. Raptor uses 2.5" disks so 200gb platters should be possible. SATA1 might be at it's limit finally if they did one like that so SATA-II would be useful.

i realize that. for servers, no 7200 even comes close.

for desktop, its a bit different, primarily due to usage patterns... and owning 5 raptors myself, its not like im dissing them or anything, theyre fast, even the oldest 36GB GDs are still. the point i was making though, is that the higher the density at a set rpm and area, the more data is able to be covered and accessed in a quicker amount of time. taking only 36GB of a 334GB platter for example, will most likely result in faster desktop performance than the same 36GB of a 36GB total 74GB raptor platter, if not at least on par.

taking a total 334GB platter, and comparing it to a 74GB raptor platter is questionable for performance though especially if the data is spread out across the whole platter... you still have to search across the whole 3.5" platter @ a slower 7200 rpms, just to locate that one piece of data, defeating any performance improvements it might have over a raptor. raptors are less affected by fragmentation though, for the same reasons listed above (smaller 2.5" platters, which allow for the higher rpms, so thats a multi performance improvement over 3.5" platters).

but, if you partition accordingly, the 334GB platter hdd should perform well in comparison to current raptors for desktop uses. the 74GB ADFD raptor i have, ive partitioned into several partitions, each up to 25GB in size. the fastest 25GB one for windows xp x64, a slightly slower 25GB partition for windows games, and still slightly slower 10GB partition for ubuntu 7.04. i left about 10GB unformatted at the end, as thats the slowest area of the whole platter, that i probably wont use for that reason. but this way performance is kept as fast as can be, and no real performance related concerns.

as far as future raptors, theres been rumors of a 15k raptor, which may or may not have pmr, sata300 is likely though, because as you said, the STRs may finally exceed sata150, giving them a reason to actually use it then.

Our German colleagues at Hartware.net say that according to their sources, the Samsung SpinPoint F1 drives announced in June won’t be available until October. These hard drives have the particularity of having platters that can each attain 333 GB versus 166 to 250 GB for the competition.

Beginning of october indeed: http://www.hartware.de/news_42808.html
I will definately get me one or two of the single platter version.

I'm definitely interested in the 1TB drives.

I am also interested in the TB model.

Just a guess, but it would seem to be a leap forward in performance.

The way I see it, it should mean less noise, lower power consumption (not a big deal) which means less heat (a big deal).