If asked to name a hard drive manufacturer, most folks are likely to point to Seagate or Western Digital. Some might even mention Hitachi or Maxtor, but Samsung? Probably not. Samsung's hard drives have seemingly been lost in the flurry of flat-screen televisions, cell phones, MP3 players, printers, and other products in the consumer electronics giant's portfolio. That's really a shame, because Samsung's latest Spinpoint F1 hard drive is quite an achievement.
The F1 is Samsung's first stab at the terabyte mark, and it comes to the party a little late. Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 first broke the terabyte seal last year, and it was followed by Western Digital's Caviar GP and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11. However, what makes the F1 special isn't its terabyte capacity, but how Samsung has packed that much storage capacity into the drive. Hitachi achieves a terabyte using five 200GB platters. Seagate and Western Digital use four 250GB platters. Samsung needs only three platters, each of which packs a whopping 334GB.
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*Review: Tech Report (
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14200)*
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