When Samsung announced new F3 series, as one of the fastest hard drives with low price tags, we were all excited but at the same time worried, because this kind of announcements can cut both ways. If this new series cannot fulfill everyone’s expectations, its successful existence will be doomed. Samsung stated that high performances, low noise levels and low price will be possible thanks to the fact that platters of 500GB will be used in combination with low-noise “green” technologies from F2 series. Spinpoint F3 series consist of two models: first one with one 500GB platter and second one with two 500GB platters. We got first model in our test lab: HD502HJ.

This is SATAII HDD with 16MB of cache (1TB model should have 32MB of cache) and one platter that rotates at 7200rpm. It was announced as “WD Black series killer” and as such it has to prove its reputation that was impelled even before it appeared on the market. We used standard battery of benchmarks that include HD Tune, ATTO Bench and our own HDD Test. Results that we got were pleasant surprise. Even our expectations were surpassed with average read and write speeds of over 110MB/s which is great result. If you take a look at already mentioned Hard Drive Roundup you will notice that none of those drives reached those values when it comes to average transfer rates.

Spinpoint F3 model can be compared even with newest ultra-fast WD Raptor that has lower access times that allows it to have slightly higher transfer rates. Interesting detail when it comes to Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ is the fact that write speeds were always higher than read speeds which is the phenomena that we encountered for the first time.

Newest trends in HDD technology where write speeds are getting close to read speeds are noticed on most of the new HDDs and it was only the matter of time when write speeds would get even with read speeds, but to get higher was not expected so soon. 

When it comes to vibrations and noise levels that Samsung Spinpoint F3 produces we must admit that this is one of the quietest hard drives that we encountered, which are great news. Until now we accepted Raptor noise levels as something that comes with territory and high transfer rates, but after Samsung Spinpoint F3 - no more. Only area where Samsung offered average performances is heating up. It is not getting unpleasantly hot so it cannot be held with bare hands, neither it is warm as WD Raptor with Ice Pack, but rather somewhere in the golden mean where most other HDDs can be also found. Please don’t look at this feature as something bad since we haven’t told you most important feature.