Samsung Spinpoint F4

Any ideas when WD and Seagate coming out with 667 gb/platter drives?

Will I see much performance or noise difference between Samsung F3 and F4?

What isn't as impressive? 155MB/s sequential throughput is quite nice; for anything else we know HDD sucks hard. HDDs will only ever be good in sequential I/O and nothing else. Think of them as mass storage devices; while SSDs store common files like your OS and apps.

Feel threatened? Of course they do; if you competitor has 666GB platters and can sell 2TB drives with one platter less; that makes they make more money on 2TB drives than those still using 500GB platters. So of course everybody feels threatened by Samsungs good progress. WD EARS 3-platter is also not distinguishable from the older 4-platters; they have the same product name as far as i know.

Beyond WD EARS 3platter and Samsung F4 i have not yet seen any 666GB-platters in the wild.

The F4 is faster than the 500GB blacks, so what isn't there to be impressive? The Blacks use high-power seeks; something benchmarks undoubtedly will forgot to mention. To compare Samsung and WD in seek benchmarks, you would need to tune the AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) settings of the drive. I suspect the WD Blacks come with higher power seeks by default.

So i still don't understand why you are not impressed. The Samsung F4 may well be the fastest desktop-class HDD at the moment.

The F4 320GB is no faster or slower than a 2TB F4 for sequential transfers, the main advantage here is the low amount of mechanical components, meaning these 320GB disks should be very reliable and fail much less often than multiplatter disks. They are mostly used in OEM market, where the warranty is done by the OEM-company (Dell, HP) instead and as such reliability and failure rate become very important.

So i think both the 320GB and 2TB F4 drives are very interesting from multiple perspectives.