F1 RAID Class 3.5” SATA : Samsung Announces New 1TB RAID CLASS 3.5” Hard Disk Drives for Enterprise Storage and Surveillance Applications

Seoul, Korea, January 3, 2007 - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a worldwide leader in digital consumer electronics and information technology, announced today its new F1 RAID Class 3.5” SATA hard drive featuring 1TB of capacity specifically designed and manufactured for enterprise storage and surveillance applications. Offering the world’s highest recording density using only three platters and running at 7,200rpm, the F1R drive is designed for demanding applications such as database, email servers, web servers, super computing, software development, data warehousing, surveillance, call center and nearline/backup storage systems.

“Demand for storage capacity continues to grow at an annual rate of nearly 60 percent and high capacity disk drives are increasingly being deployed in data centers to meet this demand.” according to John Rydning, IDC’s research manager for hard disk drives. “Samsung’s new F1R with 1TB of capacity on three platters offers enterprise customers an attractive combination of capacity and features for this growing segment.”

Samsung’s new Spinpoint F1R is made to meet the industry’s highest quality standards, providing a mean time between failure (MTBF) of up to 1.2 million hours. The new F1R also offers enterprise class features such as command completion time limit, and vibration tolerance with RV controller (RVC). It features a 16 or 32MB cache, a Serial ATA 3.0Gbps interface, a 175MB/s maximum media transfer rate, and NCQ for random I/O performance. Samsung leads the industry with its implementation of perpendicular recording and three platter 1TB design.

The new Spinpoint F1R is ideal for use in video surveillance and similar environments with critical features such as high reliability in heavy-duty, 24/7 operations, low power consumption, improved performance, high capacity, and A/V streaming firmware command set. The Spinpoint F1R ensures low heat generation and power consumption, high durability and stability in extreme environments (low/high temperatures, high humidity), stable performance for prolonged operation periods, and large storage capacity for extended recording time.

Samsung has improved recording stability via PMR recording and data integrity, and reliability through full-extent dynamic Flying-On-Demand (FOD) control. This advanced FOD control technology ensures enhanced read/write sensitivity by dynamically lowering the fly-height in read or write mode while maintaining a consistent and higher fly-height across the disk in standard mode.

“The dramatic increase in digital content is driving the need for greater storage capacity across the board, ” said Andy Higginbotham, director of hard drive sales and marketing, Samsung Storage System Division. “With our new F1R, we are entering the enterprise marketplace in full force by offering best-in-class performance and low power consumption.”

The Spinpoint F1R incorporates a wide range of proprietary technologies to achieve increased performance and lower power consumption. The three-platter structure provides a higher data storage density per platter, resulting in faster data processing speeds when compared with other 1TB drives. The optimized electronics and power saving modes reduce power consumption and resulting heat dissipation, making the F1R the coolest operating 1TB drive in its class. Under the same test conditions with similar drives, the Spinpoint F1R uses the lowest power, just an average of 6.7 watts in idle mode and an average of 7.2 watts in random seek mode. In addition, the drive operates at just 2.7 Bell in idle mode.

The Spinpoint F1R drive features a 334GB per-platter capacity, a 7200RPM spindle speed, and a 32MB cache. Its performance is further enhanced through Samsung’s optimized firmware system, a rotational vibration controller (RVC) for vibration tolerance, and an optimized system-on-chip (SOC) controller that lowers power consumption.

Samsung’s Spinpoint F1R will be available in the first quarter of 2008.