After Western Digital and its 2 TB Caviar Green, Samsung announced its similar product known as Spinpoint F3 Ecogreen.
Of course, performance levels are a bit down when compared to non-Ecogreen HD, however, this new Samsung HD spinning at 5,400 rpm wants to provide a storage capacity as silent as possible with the lowest power consumption. Its price should be around 150 Euro.
While it has been during years a niche market, 3.5" HD at 5,400 rpm are now quite popular and the performance gap with their brother spinning at 7,200 rpm is not really significant in most usage, especially when using them in a NAS or other similar function where the bottleneck is not linked to the performance of the drive, but rather the performance of the installation/cables. Today, if you want performance, you should rather look at SSD, and so Ecogreen HDs are a true solution for large data storage. We could really think of having a desktop computer with a 2.5" SSD for the system and applications, then a secured RAID volume composed of Ecogreen HD.
