Samsung SpinPoint EcoGreen F2 1.5TB review

Internal hard disks with a 1.5TB capacity used to be fairly common, but they’ve fallen out of favour as 1TB and 2TB disks continue to drop in price. As you’d expect, Samsung’s 1.5TB SpinPoint EcoGreen F2 costs more than a 1TB disk but less than a 2TB model, so you may still be tempted by one if your budget can’t quite stretch to the larger capacity. The F2 is certainly good value at £70 or a low 5p per gigabyte.

Like other disks in Samsung’s EcoGreen range, the F2 has a spindle speed of 5,400rpm instead of the faster 7,200rpm. This is supposed to use less power. Unfortunately, the cost of this is file transfer performance. Although it wasn’t too far behind the competition when writing large files at a fairly fast 89.5MB/s, it fell behind other disks when reading large files managing just 88.5MB/s. This pattern repeated itself in our small files tests, writing them at a reasonably quick 65.2MB/s, but lagged far behind the competition when reading them at a sluggish 44MB/s.

Given this rather inconsistent file transfer performance, we weren’t surprised to see the F2 fare unremarkably in our demanding Crysis level loading benchmark. It loaded the large game level in 39 seconds, which is one of the slower times we’ve seen.

If you just wants lots of storage, but can’t quite afford a 2TB disk, and don’t care about performance then the 1.5TB SpinPoint EcoGreen F2 is good enough. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that Samsung’s own 2TB SpinPoint EcoGreen F3 hard disk costs just £20 more for 33 per cent more storage and superior file transfer speeds. If you can afford it, it’s easily the better disk.