News

• The Good: Massive storage space for backups, data or multimedia content. It has an audio-visual streaming firmware command set for multimedia junkies, and will prove to be an ideal drive for a media home server. It runs quietly and uses little power, thanks to proprietary technologies built into it.
• The Bad: It's expensive. There will be a lot of data lost if it should ever crash.
• The Verdict: This is more of a landmark product for Samsung than a must-have product for users, who would be better off buying two slightly smaller drives for a lot more space at the same price
• 
  

It came as a humbling experiience that I immediately ran into a problem testing out Samsung's new F1 Series 3.5-inch 1 terabyte hard drive. I couldn't get my computer to recognize it. It took me more time to find the reason than I care to admit, but eventually I did: The disk simply hadn't been formatted.

Now I have installed many hard drives in my day, and most seem to have arrived pre-formatted. I had just been lulled into complacency.

So I simply clicked the format disk option, and waited while the computer did its thing. I waited. And waited. Not surprisingly, it takes some time to format a terabyte.

It was enough time to digest the notion that the F1 Series might not have been the first 1-TB drive on the market when it was released a few weeks ago (following competitors at Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital), but the first to achieve the 1-TB capacity using only three platters; Hitachi did it with five platters, while Seagate and Western Digital did it with four.

Nevertheless, we're now in the age of terabyte storage, and it's a big deal: a 1-TB drive is a kind of watershed mark, such as the four-minute mile, $100-a-barrel oil or unlimited long distance.

I also began wondering whether shipping an unformatted drive was done on purpose, just to show you that the disk, billed as the “world's highest recording density” using only three platters (334 GB per platter), really is a terabyte in size. It's actually a little bigger than a terabyte in the pre-formatted state, but less after the formatting process (953 gigabytes to be precise). The loss of 47 GB of space is about as much as a good-sized drive was four years ago or so.

Still, almost 1 TB is big enough to for most media junkies to store a lot of their precious data. Put it inside a box running Microsoft Home Server, and you should be set for a couple of years, at least. But the drive, built to be in continuous use with low power consumption, is also good for central databases, e-mail and Web servers, software development and video surveillance — it has an audio-visual streaming firmware command set.

Fully formatted, the Serial ATA disk ran flawlessly. Lacking benchmarking tools, I can say the drive's 7,200 rpm spindle finds files on it in no less times than if it were a smaller drive.

The specs support observations. According to TomsHardware.com, the Samsung 1-TB drive performed about the same as Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital products in performance tests despite using fewer platters. It has a maximum throughput of 118 megabytes per second, “which is up to 18 per cent faster than Seagate's 100 MB/s maximum, and the average and minimum throughput when reading and writing also dominate the benchmark results.”

The secret sauce in the disk, which looks much like any other SATA drive, is stuffed with a number of proprietary technologies to help increase performance and decrease power consumption. The three-disk design offers higher storage density per platter, which means processing speeds are faster than some other drives of equal size. The electronics are also optimized, and power-saving modes help dissipate heat, which make it a very cool drive.

The F1 also features a 32 MB cache, and a mean-time-between-failures (MTBF) rating of up to 1.2 million hours, which, if true, is really impressive.

It's also a very quiet drive — Samsung has a technology it calls SilentSeek that reduces noise and vibration. In this test, I had to touch it several times to make sure it was still running.

Low power consumption and less heat generation have prompted Samsung to bill the drive as an environmentally friendly or “green” product, but I doubt that greenness was at the heart of the decision to make it cool and run at low power, when efficiency and life span would be more likely motivations.

So, is this impressive drive really something to shoot for?

In a word, no — at least not yet. At a price of $332.14 (from Softchoice.com), you can do better buying two 750 GB Samsung F1 drives for one dollar more, thereby picking up half a terabyte in the process. (Besides 1-TB hard drives, the SpinPoint F1 series also includes 320 GB, 500 GB and 750 GB models.) Still, being one of the first on the block adds immensely to product reputation. A whopping drive like this should be good for Samsung. And the resulting popularity should drive the price down too.