Samsung HDD 500 GB notebook

Capacity and price have been the advantages of traditional hard drive technology over the increasingly popular solid state disk drives. Samsung is the first HDD manufacturer to ship a gigantic 500 GB 2.5” hard drive (Fujitsu was first to announce such a drive), which is almost 16 times the capacity of the mainstream SSD (if we can call the SSD mainstream) and twice what is currently considered the higher-end of mainstream notebook hard drives (250 GB).

You won’t be able to achieve any speed records with Samsung’s 5400 rpm Spinpoint M6 drive, but three 2.5” platters holding 167 GB each is the highest capacity currently available for notebooks. You could store up to 160,000 high-resolution digital images, 125 hours of DVD movies or 60 hours of HD video on the drive, Samsung said.

The suggested retail price of $299 is about twice what would currently pay for a 5400rpm 250 GB hard drive, and about 50% more than what 320 GB 2.5” drives (Hitachi was the most recent manufacturer to announce such a drive) are going for currently. SSDs cannot compete on price with these large-capacity hard drives yet.

Vendors such as Dell are currently charging somewhere between $210 and $300 for a 32 GB SSD and $510 for a 64 GB SSD ($850 including a separate 200 GB HDD). If you were to purchase such a drive in retail, you would have to calculate about $400 for a 32 GB SATA SSD (IDE models are available from about $180). 64 GB versions are currently selling for about $2000, 128 GB versions for $3100 and up and 256 GB SSDs recently showed with prices starting at about $7500.

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New Samsung 1 TB HDD

Samsung sent over a press release revealing the new Spinpoint F3 line of high-density hard drives that only use two platters. Operating at 7200 RPM rotational speed, the new line provides up to 1 TB (Terabyte) of storage, meaning the drive's two platter disks would consist of 500 GB each. By using only two disks, the drives use less power and offers 30-percent higher performance than a three-platter drive in the same 3.5-inch form factor.

“Our customers require not only additional capacity but also high performance for their server and desktop storage systems, while promoting a green environment,” said Choel-Hee Lee, vice president of marketing, Storage Systems Division, Samsung Electronics. “The massive capacity-per-platter and high-performance features of the new Spinpoint F3 make it an attractive solution for driving the growth of high-density storage.”

Samsung also stated that the Spinpoint F3 series is compliant with the Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive (RoHS), and uses SilentSeek and NoiseGuard to "achieve a quiet operation system." The drives also use a 3.0 Gbps SATA interface, Native Command Queuing features, and a 16 MB / 32 MB buffer memory.

The 1 TB Spinpoint F3 drive is scheduled to ship in August, however the 500 GB version (using 250 GB per platter we assume) is now available worldwide.

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10 TB for $1,000: Tom’s Hardware's Über RAID Array : The 10 TB Array

Need more capacity? Want more hard drive performance? Knowing that hard drive prices are about to drop below $80 for a 1 TB drive, we decided to create the ultimate RAID array, one that should be able store all of your data for years to come while providing much faster performance than any individual drive could. Twelve Samsung 1 TB hard drives helped us to reach speed records and an impressive 10 TB net capacity.



Some of you may want to argue over this performance statement. After all, doesn’t everyone know that hard drives don’t stand a chance against solid state drives (SSDs)? It’s true. More and more high-end SSDs can now exceed 200 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write throughput with virtually zero access time—numbers that are becoming standard for more and more high-end SSDs. However, lofty SSD costs remain an issue, which is where good old hard drives kick in.

While hard drives can’t match an SSD’s quick access times, higher throughput can be achieved by using more than one drive in a striping RAID mode—and throughput is still the top characteristic people care about on their desktop systems. In addition, hard drive capacities exceed SSD capacities by many times over and also beat SSDs in terms of cost per gigabyte. For example, $1,000 won’t buy you more than 1 TB in SSD capacity, and even to get close requires taking a step or two down in performance. Meanwhile, with hard drives, we had 12 x 1 TB at our disposal. The only reason we didn’t use larger hard drives was constrained availability in quantities of ten or more.

The Idea: Massive Hard Drive Storage Within a $1,000 Budget

The prospect of using up to 12 3.5” hard drives in RAID certainly isn’t very applicable for desktop PCs. Twelve drives require a lot of space, a suitable SATA RAID controller, and they produce a noticeable amount of heat, noise, and vibration, as well. Still…it’s cool, and we’ll soon see what a massive RAID array using conventional hard drives can actually do.

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