Seagate proudly announced this afternoon the release of platters with a storage capacity of 250GB, but we have obtained some information about the Spinpoint F1 that started to be listed by German shops about 10 days ago. The 1TB versions, HD102UJ and HD103UJ, respectively feature 16 and 32 MB of cache and 3 platters with a storage capacity of 333 GB! 320, 500 and 750 GB versions are also scheduled to be released. They will use respectively 1, 2 and 3 platters.
Additionally to the lower thermal dissipation or noise level, Samsung's other advantage for having less platters is the reductions of productions costs… and this is also beneficial for end users! The price of the 750GB version in Germany is 160-180 € depending on the cache size and 230-250 € for the 1TB. For comparison, 200-210 € is what you have to spend for the Hitachi and Seagate 750 GB hard drives and 310€ for the Hitachi 1TB, who was the only one so far on this segment.
The only problem is that the exact release date of the Samsung SpinPoint F1 isn't yet known.
