Although suggesting its new hard drive is capable of speeds seen on a Formula One circuit is perhaps a little hyperbolic on Samsung's part, it's not an altogether unreasonable claim.

This is a very fast hard drive, reaching writing speeds of 88.8 MB/s and reading speeds of 86.7 MB/s.

The price you pay for such high speeds, though, is a drive that makes quite a lot of noise.

Noise Management

Activating the Automatic Acoustic Management feature improves the noise levels.

With AAM turned on, the scraping of the write heads across the disk platters is less audible, but we're still a long way from the excellent results of Western Digital's SE16.

When reading, the noise management has no real impact on performance, but slows write speeds down by about 10%.

The SpinPoint F1 Family

This particular drive, the HD753LJ, is just one member of a very large collection of hard drives offered by Samsung in its SpinPoint F1 range, which is differentiated by three different criteria.

The first is the storage capacity of the disk, which stretches from 160 GB to 1 TB.

Model	Storage	Cache
HD103UJ	1 TB	32 MB
HD753LJ	750 GB	32 MB
HD752LJ	750 GB	16 MB
HD642JJ	640 GB	16 MB
HD502IJ	500 GB	16 MB
HD501IJ	500 GB	8 MB
HD322HJ	320 GB	16 MB
HD252HJ	250 GB	16 MB
HD251JJ	250 GB	8 MB
HD162GJ	160 GB	16 MB
HD161GJ	160 GB	8 MB

Second, there are three options for cache size: 8, 16 and 32 MB.  For most general purpose applications, the larger the cache, the faster the drive will perform.

Thirdly, the final aspect is the amount of storage space per disk platter. 

This is a little complicated, but this '750 GB' drive is made from three separate disk platters, each capable of storing 344 GB, making a theoretical total of 1002 GB.

Any comparison between these results and other members of the F1 family need to be based on this platter configuration and the size of the cache.

The whole collection is in the table on the left.