Samsung Spinpoint F1 HDDs: New Winners?

Conclusion

Having digested the benchmark results, we can get over the fact that the new Spinpoint F1 comes a few months later than announced by Samsung Compare Prices on Samsung Spinpoint F1. The Korean uber-company, which produces virtually everything from simple electronic devices to industrial-scale technology, really made it: it beat Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital when it comes to performance. Hitachi and Seagate still offer better access times, which is why Samsung does not dominate the I/O benchmarks, but only the Barracuda 7200.11's access time is noticeably quicker. The maximum throughput of 118 MB/s is up to 18% faster than Seagate's 100 MB/s maximum, and the average and minimum throughput when reading and writing also dominate the benchmark results. When compared to WD's Caviar GP, the new Spinpoint F1 by Samsung offers roughly a third more throughput, which is very respectable.

At a 46°C drive surface temperature it doesn't even get very warm. The other terabyte drives utilize more moving parts, so they all get hotter than Samsung's latest storage monster. Finally, the terabyte Spinpoint F1 even does well in power consumption tests: it requires 6.8 W at idle and as much as 12.2 W when performing intense I/O operations.

WD's new RAID Edition Caviar GP clearly is the most energy-efficient terabyte hard drive, and is the only terabyte drive besides Hitachi's Ultrastar A7K1000 that is validated for non-stop operation. Both also come with a five year warranty, which isn't the case for the Samsung drive. However, the power consumption difference from a performance standpoint is invalidated when looking at the huge gap between the WD Caviar GP (or the RAID Edition) and the Samsung Spinpoint F1, which is still more energy-efficient than Hitachi and Seagate.

We will follow up soon, comparing mainstream capacity versions of all four products. From what we've seen, we expect the Samsung drives to dominate other capacity points such as 750 GB and 500 GB as well, which puts the Korean manufacturer into an excellent position to take away significant market share not only from market leader Seagate, but also from Hitachi and Western Digital.

The hard drive space has become more competitive with Samsung turning up the heat. We really hope that Hitachi has a product update soon, and of course we're still waiting for Western Digital to renew its Raptor, which once was a synonym for the fastest hard drive available.

Join our discussion on this article!

  • evert
    Does anyone know what the differences (if any) are between the HD103UJ & HE103UJ models?

    Reply
  • HE=enterprise-class, raid certified. The only difference between HE and HD (in the specs) is a "rotational vibration sensor". Check them out on samsung.com.
    Reply
  • evert
    Is a rotational vibration sensor worth the extra money?

    Reply
  • qazwsx12
    HE = Enterprise Class = 7 year warranty
    HD = Desktop Class = 3 year warranty
    Reply
  • I have the famous spin ponit F1 which supossed to be compatible to sata 1 by switch or patch, @#$%^&* i can save files etc.......but it is impossible to install Windows!!!!!!!!!! And the technical support is @#$%^& no one answers. Just dont buy it!!!!!!!!!!
    Reply
  • bitage
    AnonymousI have the famous spin ponit F1 which supossed to be compatible to sata 1 by switch or patch, @#$%^&* i can save files etc.......but it is impossible to install Windows!!!!!!!!!! And the technical support is @#$%^& no one answers. Just dont buy it!!!!!!!!!!PEBKAC, all I have to say about that...
    Reply
  • I bought one of these in march 2008, it's still going strong. Perhaps I don't hammer it with read/writes (it's a storage drive after all), but it gets used daily and has been in systems and in external cases, it's literally lived in as many different houses as I have; nearly 5 years later and it's still rock solid.

    (Was looking for pictures to use it creating an icon for it, ended up here in my stumbling, and thought I'd share my two cents.)
    Reply
  • TechMasterJoe
    Update i have a HD103UJ is has 55834 Powered on hours with 2119 starts still 100% G with zero errors and prefect SMART report still one of the coolest(temps) drives i own avg 26c with my WD's doing 36c + right next to iti use it as a temp dump for torrents before my custom software runs a ed2k hash on the file and files it way on my NAS in the 6.4years of UP time i have on this drive it has only been powered off for a few days at best wish any company made drives like this now days, under 200$ i used WD Reds for NAS but they all fail after 15k~20k hours.this has just been a friendly report from a long time Anime Sub Group's Encoder and archive owner.2014 home NAS Specs24X 4TB WD Reds NAS in custom U4 rack Quad E7-4870 & 256GB DDR3 (Folding@Home 99% of the time)2X Adaptec 2274900-R (future proof for expansion)ordered 12 more WD Reds this week yet to be added "amazon delivery Tuesday"
    Reply