bdaley :
It's hard to find a lot of information regarding the sound levels of drives.
no it isn't.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14200/14
@ Idle
F1 - 49.4 / 52.2
7200.1 - 50.8 / 53.6
Caviar Green - 49.3 / 51.3
Caviar SE 16 / RE2 - 50.9 / 53.6
Raptor X - 53.9 / 58.8
Caviar comes in several flavors.....the green model spins from 5400 - 7200 to keep power and noise down and "This feature is also the reason why the performance isn't at the very top."
The green Caviar is 49.3 barely under the F1 and considering the performance difference between the Greenie and the others, I'd go elsewhere:
Average DTR
Samsung F1 (1 TB) - 91.7
Seagate 7200.11 - 80.9
WD7500 - 76.5
WD Raptor - 75.3
WD Green - 59.5
PC Mark HD Benchmark
Samsung F1 - 122.6
Seagate 7200.11 - 92.9
WD7500 - 91.9
WD Raptor - 86.3
WD Green - 74.6
The caviar is out cause it's the lowest performer among the acceptable performers and the loudest. The Greenie is out cause it's a dog.
It would seem to be a choice between the Seagate reliability and 5 year warranty and the Samsung's performance. If the 3 year warranty doesn't affect your decision, the F1
would seem to be a no brainer. The F1 gets it's performance boost from higher density platters . Samsung 1000 GB model has 3 platters which works out to 333 GB per platter. Now the F1 line has capacities of 160, 250, 320, 500, 640, 750 and 1,000 GB. At 333 GB per platter, the number just don't work. Apparently, they have two different platter densities 250 and 333 (well somewhere between 320 and 350) in this line and use from 1 to 3 platters.
Now Tomshardware review says:
"The HD103UJ is the top model of Samsung's new Spinpoint F1 family. While
all are based on the same data density (350 GB per platter), rotation speed (7200 RPM) and interface (SATA/300), only the 1000 GB and 750 GB models have the full 32 MB of cache memory."
But I can't make that math work for 500 and 750 GB drives so, I am gonna have to assume that the reviewer is wrong. Other sites have said that the 500 Gb and 750 GB models are based upon 250 Gb platters.
Seagate OTOH, uses 250 Gb platters which "works" as they offer it in sizes of 500, 750 and 1000 GB.
So the F1 at 750 GB will have no where near the performance of its 1000 GB sibling.
So if you want to bump up to the TB size, I'd say get the F1 with it's hi density platter as its the only size that is this fast. The other 250 GB multiple Samsungs, I'd expect to top out at about 88 MB/s peak and 68 average.
At 500 GB and 750 GB, Seagate is the king of the hill performance wise. AT 1 TB (and maybe 320 / 640 GB) , it's Samsung.
Is the 1.4 dB extra noise for the 7200.11 enough to offset the 10 or so MB/sec performance hit for the Samsung with the lower platter density ? That's your question.