Samsung Ecogreen F2 HD154UI: 1.5 Terabyte hard drive reviewed

The Ecogreen F2 was designed to be efficient and quiet. Therefore we were quite surprised by the results it reached in h2benchw on a Vista system: With 87 respectively 86 Megabyte per second the average read/write speed are quite good for a 5,400 rpm hard drive. The average access time are on the expected level (write: 8.9 milliseconds; read: 14.8 milliseconds). In our copy test the Ecogreen F2 HD154UI was doing surprisingly well again: A single 5 GiByte file was duplicated in 01:50 minutes and 25,000 files of the same overall size were copied even faster. At a distance of 50 centimeters the hard drive creates a loudness of only 0.2 Sone in idle and 0.3 Sone when data is accessed. The results of the Ecogreen F2 HD154UI are compared to those of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 (1,500 GB) and the Western Digital Caviar Green (2,000 GB) in the chart below:



Conclusion
IT took some time before Samsung exceeded the Terabyte limit - but it was worth the wait. The Ecogreen F2 HD154UI is surprisingly fast and nevertheless quiet. The capacity of 1.5 Terabyte is an important factor, too, of course. But to award the hard drive we would need retail prices - currently the Ecogreen F2 HD154UI is not available in many European countries. Furthermore we estimate that Seagate will add a 1,500 GiByte model to the more modern Barracuda 7200.12 series anyway while WD and Samsung will most likely upgrade the Caviar Black/Blue and Spinpoint F2 (7,200 rpm) series.

So if you really need more than a Terabyte, you should be patient for a little longer, but if you can't wait you have to decide between the more quiet and efficient Caviar Green and the cheaper Barracuda 7200.11.