Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. announced mass production of its new Spinpoint F1 RAID Class (F1R) 3.5” SATA hard drive that features 1TB capacity. The F1R is designed for enterprise storage and surveillance applications and comes with an industry-leading seven year limited warranty for enterprise applications. It is currently shipping with a $299 U.S. MSRP.

The F1R features a combination of high capacity, high performance, high reliably and low power by delivering the world’s highest recording capacity using only three platters and running at 7,200rpm. The hard drive is designed for demanding applications such as database, email and web servers, super computing, software development, data warehousing, surveillance, call centers and nearline/backup storage systems.

“With mass production of the new F1R hard drive, Samsung is offering the enterprise market a best-in-class performance and low power consumption solution for demanding enterprise and multi-user applications,” said Hubbert Smith, Director of Enterprise Storage Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor.

Samsung’s new Spinpoint F1R meets the industry’s highest quality standards with a mean time between failure (MTBF) of up to 1.2 million hours. The new F1R also offers enterprise class functions such as command completion time limit and vibration tolerance with RV controller (RVC). It features a 16 or 32MB cache, a Serial ATA 3.0Gbps interface, a 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate, and NCQ for random I/O performance. Samsung leads the industry with its implementation of perpendicular recording and three platter 1TB design.

“High capacity 3.5-inch disk drives designed for enterprise applications will represent 60% of all HDD terabytes shipped to datacenters by 2011,” according to John Rydning, IDC's research director for hard disk drives. “Samsung's new Spinpoint F1 RAID class disk drive joins others as the highest HDD capacity available with a set of features that are desired by savvy enterprise storage customers.”

The new Spinpoint F1R is ideal for use in video surveillance and similar environments with critical features such as high reliability in heavy-duty, 24/7 operations, low power consumption, improved performance, high capacity, and an A/V streaming firmware command set.

Samsung has improved recording stability via PMR recording and data integrity, and reliability through full-extent dynamic Flying-On-Demand (FOD) control. This advanced FOD control technology ensures enhanced read/write sensitivity by dynamically lowering the fly-height in read or write mode while maintaining a consistent and higher fly-height across the disk in standard mode.

The Spinpoint F1R incorporates a wide range of proprietary technologies to achieve increased performance and lower power consumption. The three-platter structure provides a higher data storage density per platter, resulting in faster data processing speeds when compared with other 1TB drives. The optimized electronics and power saving modes reduce power consumption and resulting heat dissipation, making the F1R the coolest operating 1TB drive in its class. Under the same test conditions with similar drives, the Spinpoint F1R uses the lowest power, just an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.8 watts in active mode. In addition, the drive operates at just 2.7 Bell in idle mode.

The Spinpoint F1R drive features a 334GB per-platter capacity, a 7200RPM spindle speed, and a 32MB cache. Its performance is further enhanced through Samsung’s optimized firmware system, a rotational vibration controller (RVC) for vibration tolerance, and an optimized system-on-chip (SOC) controller that lowers power consumption.