Samsung has joined the exclusive 1TB hard drive club together with HGST (Hitachi) and Seagate. But the interesting part about the new Samsung SpinPoint F1 drive isn't just the sheer size of it, but the fact that Samsung is using 334GB platters.
This means that Samsung only need three platters to make up 1TB compared to four for Seagate and five for HGST. Having more platters have caused problems in the past and the IBM "Deathstar" was infamous due to its five platter design.
Having less platters also means less read/write heads and this should allow for some cost reduction in parts. Samsung has skimped somewhat on its cache compared to the other two 1TB drive makers, as the SpinPoint F1 only comes with 16MB compared to 32MB of cache for the HGST and Seagate drives.
Even so, Samsung is charging the same US$400 as its competitors, which seems like a slight rip-off considering that the SpinPoint F1 should be a lot cheaper to manufacture due to less parts being used.
Samung also launched a 120GB 1.8in hard drive which is retailing for around US$250 and it might just find its way into the next generation of iPod's if Apple sticks to using hard drives. It's a nice upgrade for sub notebooks as well, since these tend to use the smaller 1.8in drives.
334GB per platter
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