Samsung EcoGreen F3 2 TB

The Samsung EcoGreen F3 is very much Samsung's answer to the Western Digital Caviar Green: quiet and low energy. It doesn't excell in terms of performance and has been designed as a value data storage solution.

The HD203WI, or EcoGreen F3 has a 32 MB memory cache and the platter runs at 5400 rpm. The PC interface is SATA-2 at 3 Gbps. The spec of the Eco Green F3 puts it a long way behind the best in current hard drives which often have 64 MB of cache and run at 7200 rpm.

Pure performance

Once again, remember that the rating here, in contrast to the overall rating, takes into account all drives tested, including SSD performance.

Taking our comparison with the Caviar Green series a little further, the EcoGreen F3 gives slightly better performance with large files but is slightly slower with small files:
 

This is confirmed by the AS-SSD test:
 

Access times aren't great but correspond to the average expected for 5400 rpm drives:
 

Performance in practice

The tests place the EcoGreen a little behind the Caviar Green. Its PCMark Vantage score is 3284 for example, where the Caviar Green WD10EACS and WD10EADS score 3728 and 4025:
 

This difference is no doubt due to higher access times and less efficient performance on small files. And unfortunately, these are the most important factors in everyday usage on a disk system (operating system operations, loading of software, processing files and so on).
This difference is bridged in the purely practical tests where the EcoGreen competes better with the Caviar Green:
 

On final analysis this drive is less of an all-rounder than the Caviar Green. It will be a touch faster for storing and manipulating large files but slower when used as a disk system.