Hard Drives, Yesterday And Today: From 500 GB To 1.5 TB

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2008: 1000 GB Spinpoint F1 EcoGreen (HD103UI)

The Spinpoint F1 was the first three-platter terabyte hard drive, and it still can be considered a good hard drive despite its age of one and a half years. However, Samsung added the F1 EcoGreen (EG) a bit later. This model runs at only 5,400 RPM instead of 7,200 RPM in an effort to reduce power consumption. We decided to use this model, as it’s a “first-generation” 5,400 RPM drive—more and more high capacity hard drives will be based on lower rotation speeds, so this is a perfect example to show where the power saving efforts of the hard drive industry came from. And there is good news: the F1 EG delivers better throughput than the T166, despite its reduced rotation speed.

The Spinpoint F1 EcoGreen hard drives are still available, so we have to clearly point at the newer Spinpoint F2 EcoGreen drives (see next page), which deliver further increased performance along with reduced power consumption. However, the F2 EG starts at 500 GB capacity and goes up to 1,500 GB, while the Spinpoint F1 EcoGreen is available at 250, 320, 500, 640, 750 and 1000 GB. Most models have 16 MB cache, while the 750 GB and 1000 GB capacity points come with 32 MB cache memory. The three-platter layout makes the F1 EG nearly exactly as heavy as the T166 (640 g vs. 639 g), but it provides better operating shock specifications of 70 g vs. 63 g.