Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F3 2TB review

We weren’t expecting the Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F3 2TB hard disk to do well in our file transfer benchmarks. It has a 5,400rpm spindle speed which is supposed to be more power efficient than disks with faster spindle speeds. Other energy efficient hard disks with 5,400rpm spindle speeds have tended to fare poorly in our tests, so we were surprised to find that the 2TB F3 actually excelled in most of them.

When copying large files, the F3 was one of the fastest internal hard disks we’ve seen recently. Large files were written at 99.3MB/s and read at 103.6MB/s. Although a few other disks are even faster, these are still impressive scores. It was also very fast at writing small files, doing so at a quick 73.4MB/s. Its weakness is reading small files where it crawled along at 42.3MB/s. The F3 came near the top of the charts in our tough Crysis level loading test – it loaded the large game level in 35 seconds.

This generally excellent performance is all the more surprising given how good value the F3 is. At £90 it is one of the more expensive internal SATA II hard disks we’ve seen, but its cost per gigabyte of 5p is identical to many cheaper 1TB hard disks. This means that if you can afford it, the F3 is excellent value and wins a Best Buy award.