Power Consumption and Final Thoughts
In terms of power consumption the Samsung F3 is impressive in some ways but not so much in others. During Idle times it managed to reduce power consumption to as low as 4.8W which although substantially more than an SSD that figure is almost as low as very expensive VelociRaptor drives which come with idle spin down technologies. With regards to load consumption the 8W figure we saw wasn’t brilliant and most 5400RPM drives easily do better than this but at the end of the day a difference of 1 or 2W really is peanuts when you consider the extra performance you get for the same price surely outweighs the cost of extra electricity with productivity gains.
We cannot stress how good this drive really is even given the current inflated hard drive prices. You get 1000TB of storage with 32MB of cache at 7200RPM which is certainly impressive specifications for a mechanical hard drive especially given the low price tag of £85/$160 compared to other hard drives, for example the slower Caviar Black 1TB costs £105/$190. We would definitely recommend this product you get blistering fast (for a mechanical drive) read and write speeds while you also get good random read and writes of smaller blocks although the drive isn’t as good at this as some other drives. If you use this as your primary drive you will notice decent boot times in comparison to other mechanical hard drive. However, if you are looking for really fast performance we would say go with an SSD. However, if you have a tight budget and a SATA II motherboard then we cannot recommend this hard drive highly enough.
Value For Money: 9/10
Performance: 8/10
Functionality: 8/10
Overall: 8.5/10
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