I find the Samsung Spinpoint F1 to be a fast and well perfoming hard drive. The drive noise isnt very noticable unless you seek it out and generally I am pleased with the speed and reliability of the drive. I have done numerous checks using tools on this terabyte hard disk (931 in reality if we count gigibytes) and they have all come back stating that the disk is healthy and in good shape. Temperatures are a little high for a hard drive, but for a performance product you should expect a little heat. Technical reviews praise the F1s speed, seek times and overall throughput. I havent really noticed a time when I had to wait for the disk to spin up considering that this drive is not the one my OS is installed on. The 931 GB of storage is huge and I still have 750 GB remaining after a year so I should be happy.

However, of course, I have heard the horror stories from other purchasers - which no doubt forced samsung to usher in the more reliable and probably faster F3 spinpoint 1TB drive. I am now waiting for this hard drive to fail, and when it does, I can look forward to binning it or sending it to a repair centre situated above a barber shop which samsung have decided to throw the responsibility to. As soon as I can, and as soon as is needed (when I actually do work that hasnt been back up), I will be buying another drive to replace the F1.

I CAN possibly recommend this hard drive for RAID mirroring with another similar terabyte hdd for a degree of redundancy in case one of the drives fail (some redundancy in this case is better than none), or keeping it on as a spare or to play games from. I CANNOT recommend you stripe this hdd, or you buy two for this purpose no matter how cheap they get. My confidence that this thing wont give me a massive headache, and probably cost me my job had I relied on its apparent reliability, well that confidence is shattered!