Samsung's faster EcoGreen F4EG hard drive does 2TB for less
By Thomas Ricker 
posted August 3rd 2010 12:55AM
posted August 3rd 2010 12:55AM
Samsung latest 3.5-inch EcoGreen desktop hard disk does with three platters what its F3EG did with four: obtain a 2TB capacity. That's 667GB per platter for what Samsung calls the world's highest areal density, environmentally friendly hard disk drive on the market. Specifically, this 3.0Gbps SATA disk with a 32MB buffer brings a 19 percent improved standby performance and requires 23 percent less power in standby mode than its EcoGreen F3EG. Better yet, it does all this for $60 less (just $119.95) when it ships to the US and EU markets in early September. Samsung Announces Two-Terabyte EcoGreen Hard Drivewith the Highest Areal Density for High-performance Desktop Systems
Seoul August 3, 2010 -- Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced the F4EG, theworld's highest-density, environmentally friendly hard disk drive (HDD) for the desktop market. The EcoGreen™ F4 features a 2-terabyte (TB) capacity – 667GB for each of its three disks – and is capable of storing up to 880 hours of DVD video or 500,000 songs in MP3 format.The internal F4EG utilizes Samsung's high-density design technology to provide better performance, low power and improved reliability to its 'EcoGreen' hard drives.
"Storage-hungry multimedia professionals, gamers and home PC users continue to increase the amount of video, music, photo and other personal data they store and back-up," said I.C. Park, vice president, Storage Sales, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics. "The F4EG delivers all the benefits of a low-power drive yet features top performance quality and is environmentally friendly."
With its three disks and advanced technology, the F4EG drive is 19 percent better in standby time performance and has 23 percent lower power consumption in standby mode than the previous four-disk model, the F3EG.
Eliminating halogen compound and brominated flameretardant from the PCBA, the new model is produced with eco-friendly materials and meets all the environmental regulations including RoHS (Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment) which is applied worldwide, including the European Union.
Samsung's new hard drive utilizes its low noise operation technology SilentSeek™ and NoiseGuard™ to achieve quiet system operation.
The F4EG incorporates a 3.0Gbps SATA interface, Native Command Queuing and a 32MB buffer memory. The 3.5" F4EG drive is available in 1.5TB and 2TB capacitiesin the United States and EU markets with a MSRP of $119.99. Initial shipment is scheduled for early September.
Seoul August 3, 2010 -- Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a world leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, today announced the F4EG, theworld's highest-density, environmentally friendly hard disk drive (HDD) for the desktop market. The EcoGreen™ F4 features a 2-terabyte (TB) capacity – 667GB for each of its three disks – and is capable of storing up to 880 hours of DVD video or 500,000 songs in MP3 format.The internal F4EG utilizes Samsung's high-density design technology to provide better performance, low power and improved reliability to its 'EcoGreen' hard drives.
"Storage-hungry multimedia professionals, gamers and home PC users continue to increase the amount of video, music, photo and other personal data they store and back-up," said I.C. Park, vice president, Storage Sales, Semiconductor Business, Samsung Electronics. "The F4EG delivers all the benefits of a low-power drive yet features top performance quality and is environmentally friendly."
With its three disks and advanced technology, the F4EG drive is 19 percent better in standby time performance and has 23 percent lower power consumption in standby mode than the previous four-disk model, the F3EG.
Eliminating halogen compound and brominated flameretardant from the PCBA, the new model is produced with eco-friendly materials and meets all the environmental regulations including RoHS (Restriction of the Use of Certain Hazardous Substances in Electrical and Electronic Equipment) which is applied worldwide, including the European Union.
Samsung's new hard drive utilizes its low noise operation technology SilentSeek™ and NoiseGuard™ to achieve quiet system operation.
The F4EG incorporates a 3.0Gbps SATA interface, Native Command Queuing and a 32MB buffer memory. The 3.5" F4EG drive is available in 1.5TB and 2TB capacitiesin the United States and EU markets with a MSRP of $119.99. Initial shipment is scheduled for early September.
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@LeJay
I just wonder how stable that thing will be.
Wow! That's a lot of capacity for $120.
@bj55555
2TB is a big load in a small 3.5" package.
@Kurian
that's what she said
Woot! More storage for my legally downloaded files!
@koolerz1569
Same, I have like 37 movies that take up 51GB, it costed me about $30 (internet bill)
:)
I can see the 5TB drives in the distance...and they are to be affordable!
@Zzephyr
You're predicting a trend that has been going on for over 30 years to continue for a little while longer? Bold sir... Very bold.
@LeJay err, no, what I said was...I can see the 5 TB drives in the distance and they are to be affordable!
Does the loss of 32mb of cache make a difference? You can already find the 2TB WD Green drive (w/ 64mb of cache) for the same price (or lower).
@Wag
having fewer platters probably makes up for it.
"it does all this for $60 less (just $119.95)" the current low end 2tb drives are going for 120$ (100$ if you catch them on sale) so hopefully this will be around 80$ in no time
Wow imagine having one of these crash... That's several million family photos gone like that. Hopefully you have backups tho lol
@marsel With these drives being so cheap, I buy them in pairs nowadays. I'm still reminded of my first Newegg purchase, an 80GB for $104.
@darknite39
What are you, 18? My first hard drive was 10MB. TEN MEGABYTES. It sounded like a goddamn 707 taking off. And its idle power draw was greater than the maximum draw of THE COMPUTER IT WAS IN.
@darknite39 That reminded me of my first hard drive purchase in 2005 (Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 ST380817AS 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 1.5Gb/s 3.5" Hard Drive -Bare Drive) for a low low price of $59 off newegg
@xyglyx Sorry my nerd cred doesn't meet your standards. I've only been buliding systems since 2000 or so. I've certainly had computers long before that.
@xyglyx mine? 5.23inch 1.2MB Floppy disk drives. I was really happy that I had 2 disk drives.
@kwonyu80
80K 5.25" floppy drives on the TRaSh-80. We had four drives, and a whopping 360K storage capacity. My dad ran a database off of that thing for his business, and we were constantly swapping disks to access different records. When we finally got a hard drive it was 5MB, and weighed about as much as a cinder block, but it was still a massive improvement at the time. I have no idea what it cost, but I'm quite sure it was way more than $120. Probably closer to $1000.
@xyglyx, My first computer system was a wooden tree branch with carvings I'd put on it. It wasn't a very good computer as it was missing things. I wrote an entire report with only zero's as it was missing 1's. Truly a horrible experience. It had a capacity of 8 bits. Not an 8 bit computer, but just 8 bits on the branch. Then I wanted to upgrade to this other computer that had 17,468 vacuum tubes, weighed 30 tons, and used 150 kW of power. But I couldn't afford it ;-)
@sodalake LoL... loved this post. :)
Western Digital green drives were on sale all last week for 99 bucks at 2TB. Was gonna grab two for storage but I missed out, now they are back up at 119 from amazon.
Well how about a four platter 2.67TB version then?
No mention of RPM? Must be slow.
@Spectracide Most if not all "green" drives are 5400rpm.
2TB for $119? I'm sold
@Hydra
1) Go to slickdeals.net
2) Type in "2TB" in search
3) Notice that there have been five 2TB deals for less last month alone.
2TB goes for about $100 right now on sale.
Pfft who needs that little memory? I want a 5TB SSD with buit in ram(8gigs), and an i7 for kicks.
/sarcasm
Seriously who needs thah much memory I got over 750gigs open on a 1TB partitioned(into 2 500gig parts) I mean my largest programs take less than 20gigs
@23542354
1080P movies and TV shows take up a crapton of space. Think about it, a typical bluray movie is around 30GB.
@23542354 Lots of people are moving all their movies and music onto hard drives. This can this can quickly take up lots of space if you are storing DVD's in their original format or 1080p content such as blu-ray. That plus generally you want to have it backed up or mirrored to protect against drive failure.
@23542354
And some of us REALLY like porn. I mean, REALLY, REALLY, like porn. It isn't even funny.
@23542354
I most certainly need that much memory. I shoot and edit a lot of video. With rendering for the edit and rendering for the effects at 1080 the storage gets chewed up and spat out pretty quick. Right now I have 3TB on my personal machine and I just went through purging unneccessary files today. The last film I worked on went through 5TB for just the raw footage. Give me 10TB on my personal machine and I could be comfortable for a while.
@charliehorse I don't think I was very clear with that last post. The 5TB was on a workplace machine. A mobile one that our director kept in her hotel room.
I assume this uses 4k sector?
@pika2000
For Drives with this kind of capacity, it's pretty much a given. Problem, now is the the PC Bios has hit a wall. So when are the Motherboard mfrs. going to start shipping boards with (U)EFI so we can actually boot off partitions larger than 2TBs?
@rduran
Well, if you used a Linux-based distribution, you would know that all your OS has to do to negate this is set up two partitions: one with the boot information, and one that takes it from there. Pretty simple, I can tell ya. Now, if only Windows would do this...
Four platters on the F3EG and three on the F4EG. Go figure
I predict this will on sale for $100 bucks by 2011. And There'll be a slightly improve Hard Drive that be about $120 again.
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I hope by 2011, there be 3TB for $150.. But it probably won't happen until Q4 of 2012..
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Hard drive is still big like WindowsXP. SSD is still a baby, I'm guessing SSD will end its cycle when it reaches 20 or 30TB.
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We probably be laughing our ass out in 15 so years later, when we had bought a SSD 60gigs for $150. When then, it'lll be worth $25 or so bucks.
@darok3k
15 years? That will happen in 2 to 3 years at most.
The question is will the blender need less power?
ill have to get this for my films and tv shows ive used over 5 tbs already
are these server grade drives? i thought these green drives were bad for servers since they are very slow RPM.. Looking to replace a system drive in my HP mediasmart.
This begs to be put into a double or triple redundancy ZFS raid (as with any other 1+ TB drive, their failure rates are just too high)
I would have preferred a 7200RPM drive at this speed.
Besides moving from a 4 platter drive (500gb x4 to 667gb x3) what's the news?
You can buy a 2TB drive for under $100 now and have been able to for months. Where have YOU been?
Too bad Samsung HDs still have a crappy death rate and a terrible RMA process. Give me a slightly more expensive WD or Seagate any day of the week.
First 1 TB drive eary 2009, $110
second drive spring 2009 $80
thrid drive summer 2009 $70
4th+5th drive winter 2009 $120 (both)
1.5tbx2 spring 2010 $130 (both)
2TB drive $80 7/2010
Its just a matter of finding that special deal.
I currently have 9 TB in external Drives and 16.5 TB in internal drives.
Sorry but WD was first with the 3 platter 667gb/platter disks. The latest version of the WD20EARS disk thats been out since May is such.
@spikestabber
+1 yup
Awesome, the less platters the better. This also means a 3TB is coming pretty soon. Great for mass storage.