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This is hands-down the fastest hard drive I've had the pleasure of owning. I tested mine with HD Tune Pro and the average read speed is a solid 124MB/sec. This is in fact faster than the 10,000RPM VelociRaptor drive! Quite a feat for a 7200rpm drive. It has the same MTBF rating as most "enterprise" drives at 1.2 million hours. Of course, no idea how true this actually is - but if you look at the Component Return Rate article on BeHardware, not only does Samsung hard drives have the lowest return rate of all the manufacturers, the Spinpoint F3 1TB is solid on top of the list as the least returned hard drive! It's a shame, though, that Samsung only offers 2-year warranties on them as opposed to the 5-year ones offered to the F1 series.
These spoinpoint F3s are definitely a sleeper hit among budget minded enthusiasts. I'm not going to pretend that these drives are as fast as SSDs because that would just be ridiculous. But with its current low capacity and high selling price for newer Solid State Drives, is it really a wise choice paying to be an early adapter of the technology? If SSDs aren't all the rave, this model would've garnered much deserved attention. These drives have great performance compared to its many regular hard drives out there. Of course, these aren't as fast as SCSI drives but they don't carry the hefty price tag, and the low capacity that comes with it. This drive even outperforms the once mighty 10,000rpm Velociraptiors in certain applications. Although, the highest capacity of the F3 is only 1TB compared to the massive 2TB Western Digital Caviar Blacks, the F3s costs significantly less even compared to their 1TB version (about $20 cheaper than the 1TB Caviar Black). And yes, these are faster still. Another interesting technology adopted in this drive is the use of higher density platters. Because each platter contain more capacity compared to other drives, lesser platters are used to reach the 1TB capacity. The end result is enhanced reliability, lower power consumption, and quieter operation. Also, don't let hard drive manufacturers fool you with SATA 3 (otherwise known as SATA 6gb/s). No regular hard drive even comes close to reaching SATA 2 (AKA SATA 3gb/s) even on RAID configurations. As of this writing this review, only a handful of SSDs in RAID configuration were bottlenecked with SATA 2. I have bought 4 of these drives so far, for 3 different systems. I plan on using 2 of these for a RAID 0 setup for my HTPC soon.Read full review
Both the fastest AND the cheapest Magnetic Hard Drive there is. It's a much better deal than a WD Caviar Black with the same performance. I own 4 and haven't had any issues with reliability. I did once order one for work that was DOA, but the replacement worked perfectly and hasn't had any issues. The other 2 I bought for work are great! So 7 orders, 1 DOA w/ replacement, 7 of 7 running perfectly and FAST!
Dollar to performance...this drive is hands down the leader of the pack of mechanical drives out there. I've built dozens of machines with them, and they continue to impress me, not only with their performance and afford-ability, but with their reliability as well. Extremely fast access times (for a mechanical drive anyway) makes this hdd my pick for an OS or application drive where I/O read writes are fast and furious.
Everything I needed and it works perfectly.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
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