Results Analysis

Sadly our concerns over the F2’s slow 5,200rpm spindle speed have been confirmed after our testing. It’s clear that the F2 isn’t going to be taking any performance crowns any time soon. But then, that’s not the point – the point is whether this disk will serve as a large-file library with sufficient finesse.

Theoretical performance as measured by HD-Tach wasn’t terrible, especially when looking at average write speeds which were a reasonable 73.1MB/sec. However, the F2 was notably slower at average read speeds than the competing Seagate drive, with an average speed of 87.5MB/sec to the Seagate’s 106.5MB/sec.

Despite decent performance when dealing with our 1GB MP3 file pattern in FC-Test, where the F2 was faster than the Seagate at both copying and reading the files, switching to our ISO file pattern was not to the F2’s credit. Writing, copying and reading the 1.6GB of files was notably slower than the Seagate - of all our tests, it’s this one that indicates how the disk will serve as a store of many large files. To its credit, the F2 does at least outpace the 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green when writing and reading these larger files.

We’ve included Iometer as part of our standard storage testing. While the performance differences between hard disks will be slight due to their universally poor performance in comparison to modern SSDs, the F2 nevertheless finishes dead last in random write, random read and combined read and write speeds. This makes the F2 even less attractive for use as a main OS boot drive.


Finally, in our real world tests the F2 really shows its deficiencies. It took a full 20 seconds longer than the Spinpoint F1 to boot Windows Vista, and over three seconds longer to load our Crysis level. These results were so surprisingly poor (especially the boot time) that we went back and re-ran our Samsung Spinpoint F1 tests, only to find they were accurate – the F2 is just that slow.

There is a saving grace for the F2: its noise and heat output were superb, as you’d expect from a low power, low-rpm disk. Even under load the drive was very well behaved, both acoustically and thermally, though the 2TBWD Caviar Green disk was slightly quieter and cooler again.

Value and Final Thoughts

Despite its sluggish performance, the F2 does have a last ace up its sleeve: its price. At around £73, you’re paying just less than 5p/GB, the same as the faster but less capacious 1TB Spinpoint F1. As we’ve already mentioned, this is around £10 less than the 7,200rpm 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.

It’s hard to look beyond the poor performance of the F2 though, especially when it comes to boot times and handling large files. If you’re intending to use this disk as a bulk storage disk in a conventional PC, it’ll keep you waiting. For £10 more, you could bag yourself the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 which is much faster, yet isn’t much louder than F2, even if it needs a bit more cooling.

As such, the F2 only makes sense if you want extreme quietness – it's ideal for a cramped NAS box or home server with little cooling, for example. In this case, the 2TB Western Digital Caviar is only worth considering if you want more than 1.5TB for a single-disk box as the cost per Gigabyte isn't quite as competitive. Let us know your thoughts in the forums.

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Score Guide