Seoul, South Korea — Samsung Electronics has begun shipping its F1 series 1TB hard disk drive.
“Samsung’s new F1 Series is our ‘racing green,’ environmentally friendly drive,” said Andy Higginbotham, hard drive sales and marketing director, Samsung Semiconductor.
According to Samsung, the F1 Series drive features a 334GB per-platter capacity, a 7200 rpm spindle speed, a 32MB cache and an MTBF of up to 1.2 million hours. The F1 Series is said to be optimized for RAID applications and features a SATA 3Gbps interface with native command queuing (NCQ) and many additional SATA features.
The company said the drive’s performance is further enhanced through Samsung’s optimized firmware system, a rotational-vibration sensor for vibration tolerance, and an optimized system-on-chip controller that lowers power consumption.
According to Samsung, the drives are designed for enterprise environments, personal video recorders, desktop PCs and other external storage applications.
Notably, the drive uses three disks for storage instead of five, which the company said allows the drive to offer “higher reliability from the fewer components inside.” It also said the three-disk structure’s higher data storage density allows for faster data processing.
To help the machine operate coolly, the product also offers “optimized electronics and power saving modes” to reduce power consumption. Samsung said that in testing the drive used an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.2 watts in random seek mode. The company also noted that the drive operates at 2.7 Bell in idle mode.
Finally, Samsung also said its SilentSeek technology helps to reduce overall noise and vibration emanating from the drive, and that the drive’s perpendicular magnetic recording with Samsung’s Flying on Demand head technology improves recording stability over changing temperature ranges.
The drive carries a suggested retail of $399.
