Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ 1 TB

Back in 2008, we tested the Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ, which used the same components (three 334 GB platters or a total of 1002 GB), but had a limited formatted capacity of 750 GB.  Today, we're looking at its clone, the Spinpoint F1 HD103UJ, which uses all of the space available.

'Spinpoint F1' is Samsung's name for its huge family of hard drives, and there are three main factors that differentiate each member of the family from the others.  First of all, they range in size from 160 GB to 1 TB. Next is the size of the onboard cache, which is either 8, 16 or 32 MB. Generally, the bigger the cache, the faster the hard drive will be able to read and write, although there are some caveats. Finally, the drives can also be divided up acording to the size of each individual platter.

Speeds
When we ran our tests, there were few surprises, and the results are very close to those obtained for the HD753LJ. For writing to the disk, this drive achieved an average speed of 79 MB/s, making it one of the fastest we've looked at so far. In the same set of tests, the 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 reached 81 MB/s. For reading from the disk, Seagate is still a little notch ahead at 94 MB/s compared to 88 MB/s here. However, it's in local and distant copying that Samsung takes the advantage, with scores that are on average 10 MB/s faster.

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1 TB   Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB
Write speed (MB/s)   Read speed (Mo/s) Local Copy (MB/s)   Distant Copy (Mo/s)

Quiet Results
The majority of fast hard drives is often accompanied by an irritating background noise. Here, though, Samsung has made a sensible compormise: the SpinPoint HD103UJ may well be slightly slozer than the 1.5 TB Seagate 7200.11, but it's a much quieter drive.

You can even make it even quieter by turning on AAM and still achieve speeds similar to those quoted above. In this mode, the background noise generated by the HD130UJ is almost equivalent to that produced by a 5400 rpm drive.

A Good System Hard Drive
In the HD130UJ, Samsung has a hard drive with a very short responste time that is very close to that of the Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB. Compared to the Seagate 7200.11, launching the different programs that form our bank of tests was much quicker.

Samsung SpinPoint F1 HD103UJ 1 TB   Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB
Crysis (s) Winrar (s) Open office (s) Photoshop (s) Access time (ms) Boot to Windows (s) Temperature (°C)