SAMSUNG Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive

Pros: This drive is extremely fast, quite, and super cold. Was debating between this drive and the Seagate 1TB but the Samsung beats it in every level except access time and seek time. This is due to the fewer read and write heads, but it only has 3 platters, which results in less heat & friction. The WD 1TB does use less energy, but only by 2 or 3 watts. Did a full format and came up with no errors. Thank you Samsung!

Cons: Price! But its not the most expensive. No free shipping either. Newegg, please drop the price and offer free shipping and I'll buy more! ...(and so will my friend Lou)... thanks...

Overall Review: I have 4 drives in my Q6600 right now and they don't come even close to the Samsung. The WD 750GB (my OS drive) runs at 38°C, the 2 Seagates run at 34°C, and the Samsung runs at an AMAZING 27°C! This is during & after transferring 385GB to it. It only went up 1°C the whole time. (Those numbers are coming from an Antec P180B case & Scythe S-FLEX SFF21E 120mm Case Fan in the bottom compartment on all fans.)

Pros: VERY FAST, VERY LARGE, WinXP installed in record time. Runs cool. Price is also great. My game load times are much faster. Crysis levels load in 2/3 the time they used to.

Cons: None whatsoever.

Overall Review: I am absolutely thrilled with this drive! This the new latest and greatest hard drive to beat. It just debuted days ago and there are only a few reviews on the net. This drive sports three 334GB platters. These denser platters make it much faster than ALL OF THE COMPETITION. My main C:boot drive was a WD 750GB GP drive which read around 72-74 MB/s using HDTach. This drive reads at 92-94 MB/s which is phenominal. Toms Hardware Guide.com has a HDD Performance Chart that compares dozens of the latest drives and this thing dominates the charts for a large margin. Go check it out.

Pros: Fastest 1 TB drive available. Photoshop benchmarks making use of scratch space are actually faster with this drive than with my 2 drive RAID 0 stripe. Mac boots and performs disk-intensive tasks faster with this disk than any other I have tried. I have had the drive installed for less than a week so far, but I have hit it with everything I can -- full format, zeroing every sector; cloned system from old drive; ran several disk-intensive benchmark programs. SMART Utility reports no reallocated sectors, nor any other problems of any kind.

Cons: There may be some concern for reliability given the other reviews, but I believe it isn't as dire as might be indicated; see below.

Overall Review: To answer INTREPID's question, "Why would anyone buy this?" The answer is all of the following: 1. Because it's the fastest 1 TB drive in existence right now; 2. Because I have two previous-generation Samsung 500 GB drives that have performed flawlessly and reliably for over a year; 3. Because consumer-reported reviews are always skewed towards the negative (people are far more likely to report a problem than a success). With nearly 50% of the reviews here a 4 or a 5, that indicates a good chance of success for any particular individual buyer. I WILL report back here if I run into problems down the road.

Pros: This drive is surprisingly quiet, I thought it would be louder, but it makes me want to get a 2nd to replace my 500 GB & 400 GB drives to remove their noise comparatively. The drive is fast despite what people who obviously have no factual bases for their claims state. You can see a review at Tomshardware.com under the Storage section. They also tested the Seagate 750 ES two reviewers claim is just as fast. Fact is the Samsung's Avg Read rate is about 92 MB/sec and the Seagate 750 ES is about 63 MB/sec = ~50% improvement. For judgment after seek time, look at the Windows Load Times. My own testing using HD Tach 3.0.4.0 also demonstrate an average of ~92 MB/sec read. Further, I notice it a lot in high end game load times online (as a real world test ). Previously, I still finished loading first in multiplayer verse all but Raptor users and other very fast drives. Now, the difference in my load time is even more noticeable and I often finish with others still at 50-60% complet

Cons: Had problems doing a large format in Windows XP SP2 + Updates. Using 680i motherboard that is known to have a fast SATA II controller but also not as robust as some of the Intel South bridges. Formatted in Windows Vista 64-bit without a problem though on same system. Cannot say where the fault of the issue ultimately rest because I did not test format again on another XP system.

Overall Review: Read the Tom's Hardware Review to see their full test of this hard drive compared to many of the most popular, newest, and "fastest" drives in the same test bed. Some of these negative reviews may have benched the drive, but you have to ask yourself, what motherboard/storage controller they are using to have a drive that clearly performs at ~92 MB/sec read in many NE reviews and professional reviews perform at the level of a Seagate 750 ES. I did not personally bench the Seagate 750 ES, but Tom's did, and they're a reliable professional reviewer and it does ~63 MB/s.

Pros: I bought it for the size and speed. It seems like the fastest 1TB drive out there right now and it even beats Raptors on the sustained transfers. This makes it a great gaming/application drive as well as storage.

Cons: Had to revert back to 15.01 nForce drivers for my 680i motherboard. Until I did that my computer would freeze and become unusable during large file transfers. This is a known problem and needs to be fixed by either nVidia or Samsung.

Overall Review: HUTIL worked fine for me using a bootable USB stick.

Pros: Tremendous storage for the price. Typical fast newegg shipping. I have three of these in a software RAID 5, they work great.

Cons: Notable clicking sound on boot up; this might be because of the raid configuration.

Overall Review: I've heard from many people that shipping makes a big difference with hard drives and it makes a lot of sense. I paid the extra for fed-ex; and all 3 hard drives worked out of the box. Also, if you have an intel d975xbx2 mobo, do not install optical drives into the blue sata ports; they won't be recognized by windows installation environment after you configure the intel raid controller. This took me several hours to troubleshooting to learn. The windows installation kept crashing right after I F6 installed the raid drivers...until I moved the DVD drive into the Intel raid controller instead of the Marvell.

Pros: Quiet, reasonably fast. Transferring files, I was able to reach over 40 MB/s (sustained) drive-to-drive over SATA 2 and SATA-to-GigE.

Cons: None yet.

Overall Review: This drive is my fifth Samsung hard drive. I've had other brands fail on me, but all of my Samsungs still work after more than 3 years of near-constant use. No problems working with OS X 10.5, Vista x64, XP, or Ubuntu 8.04 and 8.10 64-bit.

Pros: Fast, cool, quiet, big. What more could you want? I bought three of these to use in a RAID-5 array and couldn't be happier with them.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: It seems that a lot of negative reviews of this drive are coming form people with an incompatible NVidia chipset (or to be more precise, the NCQ feature of many NForce motherboards). Disabling NCQ in your BIOS or SATA driver may fix the problem, but without NCQ the drive might perform a little slower.