Samsung Spinpoint F4 (new top drive!)

Mercutio · 19 Aug 2010 at 05:11

This side of an SSD or the very newest gen velociraptors at least.

They only come in 320GB too but for a cheap massed disks raid setup that's not a BAD size.
Retailing around the £32 mark too (tho not many etailers seem to have them yet)

Stonedofmoo · 19 Aug 2010 at 08:19

..and the latency? which is usually the downfall of these high capacity per platter drives

R.C.Anderson · 19 Aug 2010 at 08:45

Looking very nice

But as Stonedofmoo said, the latency could ruin it...

Duke · 19 Aug 2010 at 08:48

Very nice. Latency is a little high but is lower than the F1 and the Green drives.

http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/review/review-of-samsung-spinpoint-f4-320gb-hard-drive/

Skeng · 19 Aug 2010 at 21:19

4.17ms not too bad.

2Thumbs · 20 Aug 2010 at 21:15

Interesting. For that kind of money I might try a RAID0 array with two of these.

RandomNoob · 20 Aug 2010 at 23:33

2Thumbs said:
Interesting. For that kind of money I might try a RAID0 array with two of these.

Im thinking the same

Boozebeard · 20 Aug 2010 at 23:43

I'll probably pick up 2 of these for raid 0 and put my games and data on them. Never done raid before o:

Redmint · 20 Aug 2010 at 23:50

Speedy, shame about the size.

wonder how long until Samsung have a faster 1TB out...

RandomNoob · 21 Aug 2010 at 00:20

When will overclockers have these is my question

Zarf · 21 Aug 2010 at 00:47

Skeng said:
4.17ms not too bad.

It's 13.7 actually (according to their HDTune results). The main components that determine access time are Seek time (time for the head to position over a track) + Rotational latency (time until the sector we want on the track passes under the head).
All 7200RPM drives will have average rotational latencies of 4.17ms, as it's the time taken for half a rotation.

7200 / 60 = 120 revs per second
1/120 = 8.33333ms (time for full rotation)
8.33333/2 = 4.16666ms (time for half rotation)

lanzarobbie · 21 Aug 2010 at 05:31

whats the difference between this and the f3

Mercutio · 21 Aug 2010 at 08:07

This is faster (or at least as fast) as the new gen velociraptors

Troezar · 21 Aug 2010 at 09:37

lanzarobbie said:
whats the difference between this and the f3

I'd like to know this too...

Vertigo · 21 Aug 2010 at 09:41

Redmint said:
Speedy, shame about the size.

wonder how long until Samsung have a faster 1TB out...

Well the F3 is already pretty much the fastest this side of an SSD or Raptor. That said the rattling coming from mine has put me right off them as a brand

d_brennen · 21 Aug 2010 at 09:45

I have 3 F3 500GB drives in RAID0 which are plenty fast enough. £90 for 1.3TB of super fast storage. SSDs need some work on capacity/price ratio to tempt me. I know that seek time is higher on this kind of setup but for the money...

These F4s are really going to make (more) of a mockery of WDs Raptors...

Slackworth · 21 Aug 2010 at 09:47

These are out end of September.

Duke · 22 Aug 2010 at 13:32

Slackworth said:
These are out end of September.

Was about to ask

sjcf1 · 22 Aug 2010 at 14:00

Shame about the size, if they're at a decent price they might be a good upgrade.

Philtor · 23 Aug 2010 at 12:42

Always used Western Digital but might take the plunge and buy one of these next month.
Look very promising...