F3 Spinpoint, 500GB or 1TB model ?

[Pygmyshrew]

Hi guys after a bit of advice...

I'm going to order a new F3 Spinpoint, i'm afraid the SSD's are still out of my affordable reach and the budget SSDs from what I can tell still don't out perform the F3?

My question though is which model of the F3 to go for, firstly the size doesn't matter (despite what they say) however there is a £10 price difference between the two so at the end of the day for me it'll come to to performance gains.

I know the F3 1Tb has a 32mb cache where as the F3 500Gb only has 16mb, performance wise would this make much of a difference in read/write performance?? If it does i'll splash the extra tenner.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Temi_D]

Cache makes no difference, all the drives perform at the same speed. That said, go for the 1TB drive

 

[k3vst3r]

F3 1TB samsung one fastest mechnical HDD's you can get

 

[Ivyforce]

+1
extra £10 for double the storage.

 

[terryuk22]

wait 2 weeks for the new f4 to come out

 

[Murdin999]

Depends really on how much storage you need, for example, myself i use very little on the main disk but a lot on a external HDD, so the main disk is small and speedy, in my case I'd wait for the f4, if you can't wait 100% the f3 1tb have it myself in my other pc, and it's one of if not the fastest HD around outside of 10krpm.

 

[Randomface74]

1tb

 

[k3vst3r]

wait 2 weeks for the new f4 to come out

what's different with the f4?

 

[Pygmyshrew]

OK so I'm feeling 1TB then!

However a few have mentioned F4, have there been any trustworthy reviews yet ?

From what I can tell the F4 has sacrified storage space for performance but Ive not found a direct comparison between F3 and F4 yet.

 

[BlackBat]

AFAIK areal density of the platter on the F4 is 667GB compared to 500GB for the F3, the 320GB F4 is a single head design HDD and as such only uses one side of the platter. I would've thought it would be cheaper to produce, quieter, use less power, be less likely to fail and faster, however it is questionable how noticeable some of these attributes may be.
Maybe next year we'll get an F5 utilising a single 1TB platter.

 

[Leeroy123]

i use the f1 and f3 1tb, superb drives.

 

[Jony27]

roughly how much would the F4s cost and do you think the prices on the F3s would go down?

 

[Leeroy123]

the f3's are cheap. i got a 1tb off an auction site new for 40 pound. thats nothing

 

[bigjimmyauk]

Here ya go i took the F1 and F4 test from test freaks then did a test on my own F3 put all 3 together so you can see the difference i'd say looking at the results may be worth waiting for the F4

what i'm really impressed at is the speed of the small read write test seems almost 4x faster than the F3

 

[bhavv]

Wow, those F4s are impressive if true!

Still, you cant beat a 1 Tb F3 for just around £45. I paid £58 for mine.

 

[gearo]

I have 2 f3 1tb pretty solid drives