Samsung Electronics has started shipments of its 1.5TB hard disk drives (HDDs) that feature three 500GB platters, which potentially open up the door to 2TB hard drives for the company. However, Samsung claims that ultimate capacity is not the goal for its “Eco Green” Spinpoint F2EG hard drives, but what is crucial is reliability and low power consumption are the corner stones of the novelty.

“Lower platter count means less power to start the motor, less power to continuously spin the motor and a lighter head-stack which takes less power to seek. With fewer heads and disks, the F2EG hard drive has a lower probability of head-disk failures, enabling customers to build more reliable systems,” said Andy Higginbotham, director of HDD sales and marketing for the Samsung Semiconductor Storage Division.

Samsung’s EcoGreen Spinpoint F2EG drive in 3.5” form-factor incorporates 500GB/1TB/1.5TB capacity, 16MB/32MB buffer memory and Serial ATA-300 interface. Samsung declares 8.9ms average seek time, 5.52ms average latency and 140MB/s media to buffer transfer speed.

As hard disk capacity increases from an increased number of disks, so does power consumption. However, Samsung’s F2EG drive offers low power consumption by using EcoTriangle, a low-power, low-heat, low-noise operation technology. With its design and fewer components, the F2EG drive is 40% lower in power consumption in idle mode and 45% lower in reading/writing mode than competitive drives. Samsung’s Eco-Triangle technology offers more energy efficient and high performance hard drive options to manufacturers of home media PC, external HDD, set-top box, and personal NAS.

Samsung Spinpoint F2EG family of drives is currently being shipped to major OEM businesses. The 1.5TB HDD is available at $149 manufacturer suggested retail price.

Tags: Samsung, Spinpoint